AYP

This lesson is about getting students excited and connecting their own personal interests to computer science. Students are asked to share something they know a lot about and teach it to a small group. Groups make a “rapid” prototype of an innovative idea and share it. Students watch a brief video about computing innovations.

In this lesson the class develops a preliminary definition of a computer. After brainstorming the possible definitions for a computer, the class works in groups to sort pictures into “is a computer” or “is not a computer” on poster paper and explain their motivations for choosing some of the most difficult categorizations. The teacher then introduces a definition of the computer and allows groups to revise their posters according to the new definition.

This lesson covers how data is collected and used by a organizations to solve problems in the real world. The class looks at two scenarios that could be solved using data and brainstorms the types of data they would want to solve them and how they could collect the data. Each scenario also includes a video about a real-world service that has solved a similar problem with data.

The Hour of Code is a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify "code", to show that anybody can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science.

In this lesson, students head over to Khan Academy to learn the basics of creating webpages using HTML and CSS.

See how a paper prototype can be used to test and get feedback on software before writing any code. To help out a developer with their idea, the class tests and provides an app prototype made of paper.

Tutorial Summary: This tutorial is designed to quickly introduce the App Lab programming environment as a powerful tool for building and sharing apps. The tutorial itself teaches students to create and control buttons, text, images, sounds, and screens in JavaScript using either blocks or text. At the end of the tutorial students are given time to either extend a project they started building into a "Choose Your Own Adventure", "Greeting Card", or "Personality Quiz" app. They can also continue on to build more projects featured on the code.org/applab page.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the need for encryption and simple techniques for breaking (or cracking) secret messages. Students try their own hand at cracking a message encoded with the classic Caesar cipher and also a Random Substitution Cipher. Students should become well-acquainted with idea that in an age of powerful computational tools, techniques of encryption will need to be more sophisticated. The most important aspect of this lesson is to understand how and why encryption plays a role in all of our lives every day on the Internet, and that making good encryption is not trivial. Students will get their feet wet with understanding the considerations that must go into making strong encryption in the face of powerful computational tools that can be used to crack it. The need for secrecy when sending bits over the Internet is important for anyone using the Internet.

In small groups, the class uses the design process to come up with ideas for smart clothing. From brainstorming, to identifying users, to finally proposing a design, this is the first of several opportunities in this unit to practicing designing a solution for the needs of others.