Skipping Unit 5 CS Discoveries

Hi,

I am just checking that it would be okay to skip Unit 5 in the CS Discoveries course. It seems like students wouldn’t be missing any skills practice that they would need for Unit 6 Circuit Playground.

Please advise.

Thank you,
Beth

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Beth,

The curriculum is open sourced and you can work around however you’d like - I’d suggest that you do a few of the Unit 5 lessons that get students thinking about data and how to organize it before you get to Unit 6 and working with Arrays starting in Lesson 10. Students will need to have an idea of how computers store information so that they can use it to recall certain information and access certain LED lights.

Brad

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Great. That is exactly the kind of advice that I was looking for.

Do you think Lesson 9: Problem Solving and Data, Lesson 10: Problem Solving with Big Data, and Lesson 11: Structuring Data will cover enough?

Beth

Wondering if you could report back how this went for your students? I may have to do something similar with my 8th graders this year (teaching the course over 2 years since I see students 2 times/week; inaugural 8th grade is doing an accelerated version of most of the course in 1 year).

Susan,

I completely skipped over Unit 5 because of time constraints. Additionally, I had students working independently through the Unit 6 material.

I found the material covered in some of the lessons in Unit 6 difficult to understand, but I am not sure if it is because we skipped Unit 5. I resorted to showing them a lot of the example solutions, because I just couldn’t understand the logic behind the code. I can’t imagine that I was so confused because I skipped the unit on Data, but maybe that is the way it is.

Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.