All the latest updates, podcasts, tools, and online guides to help facilitate your computer science classroom experience, in-person or online.
With 127 Organizations Nationwide, BootUp PD Makes New Commitment to Expand Computer Science Education In Chattanooga, TN
In this interview with GT Wrobel, we discuss the importance of understanding your “why” behind pedagogical approaches and curriculum design, the internal tensions that arise when designing curriculum used by people around the world, the potential for standards and assessment to be a form of oppression, how feedback impacts the evolution of a curriculum, considerations when designing culturally relevant curricula that is used around the world, aligning curriculum development with professional development, the importance of taking a break to prevent burnout, where we hope the field goes in the next few years, and much more.
In this #CSK8 episode Jared O'Leary unpacks Jenkins et al.’s (2009) publication titled “Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century,” which summarizes the three challenges in media literacy education and provides several core media literacy skills that can address these challenges.
In this week’s interview with Chris Woods (dailySTEM), we discuss the importance of contextualizing STEM through everyday connections, leveraging student interests, blurring boundaries between subject areas, the affordances and constraints of the acronym STEM, Chris’ new book Daily STEM: How to Create a STEM Culture in your Classrooms & Communities, continuing to learn by asking questions, and much more.
Seymour Papert, in his book Mindstorms, reminds us that the greatest benefit of integrating computers in the classroom is NOT as a tool for standardized assessment, repetitive skill reinforcement, or as Papert put it, “the computer programming the child.” Rather, he argued, “The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they think themselves”. This approach cultivates the soft skills identified as necessary in today’s workforce, including problem-solving, creativity, and cooperative learning. Further, Papert advocated that this benefit begins in pre-school. Yes...pre-school!
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.
Our Moodle Lesson Ideas and Resources is curated by fellow teachers and instructional coaches we've worked with.
Join in on the conversation with colleagues and peers about all things computer science!
We’ve compiled some resources to help districts, teachers, and families cope with the rise of school closures around the nation.