All the latest updates, podcasts, tools, and online guides to help facilitate your computer science classroom experience, in-person or online.
Scratch, the world’s largest coding community for young people, announced the 41 organizations selected to participate in the first year of the Scratch Education Collaborative (SEC). Among the selected is BootUp Professional Development - an organization dedicated to empowering elementary teachers and students through computer science and creating equitable computer science programs in underrepresented and underserved communities.
In this interview with Grant Smith, we discuss the importance of continuing to learn from other educators, what informal and formal learning spaces can learn from each other, how COVID has impacted Grant’s teaching philosophy, our preferences for in-person or virtual professional development and classroom instruction, lessons learned from entrepreneurial adventures in CS education, learning by jumping in and trying new things, heuristic-based learning, and so much more.
In this episode Jared O'Leary unpacks the Kapor Center’s (2021) publication titled “Culturally responsive-sustaining computer science education: A framework,” which describes multiple courses of action for six core components of culturally responsive-sustaining CS education.
At BootUp, we talk a lot about perseverance and the desire to move past perfectionism into real creativity. At PS 134 situated in the city that never sleeps, we see this embodied in students eager to learn new skills and teachers coaching them forward.
In this interview with Jean Ryoo, we discuss equity as an evolving idea, what an ideal CS class looks like, collaborating and learning through research-practitioner partnerships (RPPs), the importance of examining our own biases, the importance of community, working through burnout/depression/anxiety, helping students through depression and suicidal ideation, the problems with whitewashing in education, and so much more.
In addition to the integration suggestions in our lesson plans and our discussion forum, our Scratch account has several studios that demonstrate the potential for integrating projects with Scratch.
Use this document to quickly access all of our ScratchJr and Scratch lesson plans and coder resources.
This spreadsheet is a curated list of more than 100 unplugged lesson plans and resources for elementary coders.
We’ve compiled some resources to help districts, teachers, and families cope with the rise of school closures around the nation.