How do you fill gaps in CSTA standards when using CSF at your school?

We have taken a survey of our courses, and found a few areas where CSF does not hit the new CSTA standards. Have you run into this in your classrooms? If so, what activities do you use to fill those gaps?

Specifically in:

  • Data Representation
  • Hardware
  • Password Safety & Attribution
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Passwords: This year I used this presentation - if you look at the notes on the slides, it has some guidance on what happens at each slide. We have a superhero theme this year which is why the superheros on the slides. I am actually using this for K-5 even though the standard is in K-2. Passwords is something that I revisit every year. Students in K-3 do not complete the “make your password” on slide 8; for K-3 passwords are assigned. We just go through what makes a strong password and create passwords for the fictional characters. This year, I am having grades 4 & up create a password that I will use to reset their accounts.

Common Sense Media also has a K-2 lesson on passwords at https://www.commonsense.org/education/lesson/powerful-passwords-k-2

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Attribution: My students have online portfolios (on Seesaw for K-2 & Google Sites for 3-5 but it could just be a written journal) where they share their work, like, for example, a link to the Flappy Bird Game they create in Course C. In their portfolio, they need to talk about how they created the game and that needs to include information about using the images for the Flappy Bird Game from Code.org. For K-2, it will most likely be in a verbal form but for 3-5, they will need to write out what they remixed (if they’re remixing) and where the images came from. We often extend into using Scratch and in that case, students are required to only use creative commons, public domain, or items they created themselves and they need to provide attribution on their project on the Scratch website.

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I like this one a lot :slight_smile:

Oh, the other thing I do with attribution is have students who are working in pairs credit who decided what in a game. So, they can write or say something like “Susie decided we should use the underwater background and I thought it would be funny to have the flappyman as the character.”

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Another thing on passwords, throughout the year, we stress that passwords are private and shouldn’t be shared. Even if students are signing into code.org with pictures or word, we talk about the fact that it’s their private picture or word and they shouldn’t tell the rest of the class which picture they have or which secret word. These may not be “strong passwords” but they are passwords and I want the students to treat them as such. I also stress signing out at the end of a session.

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