Use this thread to discuss your questions and comments about how to run the lesson.
Hello, I am looking at the lesson plans for the first time and they look great! Especially with this forum where so many have shared their insights (although I understand that the units and lessons might not match because the curriculum has been refined and improved).
Anyway, when I look at the Agenda for each lesson, the Activity is often at the end of the Agenda, rather than in the order in which the class should be taught. Why is this? It seems confusing. For example, Unit 1 Lesson 4, I believe that the Activity should be taught immediately after the Getting Started.
The Extended Learning sections are, I assume, option as time allows, or perhaps for homework?
Perhaps there is a document or description somewhere that clarifies this flow, but I haven’t seen it. If it exists, please point it out to me!
Hi @will_wright
You are correct that the order should go Getting Started -> Main Activity. That issue came up from a bug in our database that controls our curriculum system. We are currently in the process of fixing it.
Best,
Dani
Dani, thank you! I wasn’t able to take a class / PD from code.org, but am attending the AP Summer Institute next week for CSP. Are there materials available from code.org, or are those materials only for the enrolled students? It might be valuable to look at your material while I’m at APSI to get both agnostic & specific viewpoints and approaches, and help me prepare to teach. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Hi @will_wright
All of the CSP curriculum is open and available for anyone to use whether or not you have gone to PD. The easiest way to find out more about the curriculum is to go to code.org/csp.
Hope you are having a good summer!
Dani
Dani, I’m sorry, but I guess I wasn’t very clear. I’ve gotten quite familiar with the curriculum for my students, and I plan to use it starting in about a month.
What I was looking for was some additional material, for me as the teacher. I assume that there was material made available to teachers that were in the code.org CSP PD this summer. I was hoping to see that material myself, even though I wasn’t able to attend your PD. Is that possible?
Thanks!
Will
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I too have asked about this same thing repeatedly. I attended a code.org training for younger ages and they gave us a bound book with lessons for Course 1. It was nice to have the copy. I was hoping to get something like that for CSP.
Hi @will_wright and @kervin,
There are some locked down materials for teachers which you need to apply to get access to. You can apply through this form - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdGGAJuaDMBVIRYnimPhAL96w6fCl4UdvhwmynGONM75TWwWw/viewform.
Those will show up in a blue box at the bottom of some of the pages (when there is a material for that level). It will look something like below.
We understand having a printed book can be very helpful and nice for teachers but also want to utilize the abilities of the internet to make improvements and changes to the curriculum as we receive feedback. As such we don’t give out printed books because we make updates to the curriculum through out the year in order to give teachers the best materials possible. If you would like a PDF of a whole unit you can get that with our new curriculum system by going to curriculum.code.org/csp/unit1.pdf (for other units just change the number). Currently we have only released units 1 to 3 for the new version so 4-6 won’t work like this yet.
Hope this helps!
Dani
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Dani, I’ve been Unit 1 on my own, and am quite pleased with what code.org has created! the “for teachers only” is great, and nicely supports the Lesson Plan.
I know that there is an assessment for lessons 8-14. The only place I’ve seen the link to this test is on the student’s page for U1L14. Is there another place that has the link to the assessment? On a similar note, is there an assessment for lessons 1-7? I’ve been looking for a link but can’t find one.
Thanks!
Hello Will, here is a worksheet that helped my students put it all together
Jason Cevallo’s was kind enough to write this out for me and I cleaned it up.
Lesson1_Unit5.pdf (318.5 KB)
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I used this video as an intro to where ASCii became important.
It was a 5 bit device.
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Can someone explain the answer in Stage 7 to the question “What is the minimum number of bits needed to encode the 26 letters of the alphabet plus a space”
Hi @vschultz,
If you have 26 letters plus a space to encode that is 27 things you need to encode. With 5 bits you can encode 32 things from 0 (00000) to 31(11111). So 5 bits would be enough to encode 27 things. 4 bits would be too little as its can only encode 16 things and 6 bits would work but be wasting space.
-Dani
I could not find an answer key for Unit 1, Lesson 7 Activity Guide
You should see the rubric in the lesson plan or under “resources” on the first page in studio.code.org.
If you’re looking for “correct” answer to the task, I don’t really think there is one “right” way to do this. In my class we talked about what types of “bugs” a certain protocol could have but the big idea I connected to was that any strong protocol could work, but we commonly use HTML as a common protocol that computers understand to display a page a certain way. We looked at HTML code and looked for similar qualities to what they “invented” (such as tags) so they could see connections.
Does that help?
Assessment: Have students explain why this wouldn’t work. Nothing like killing a joke by explaining it…
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I have about 4 students that are truly stuck on ASCII (unit 1, lesson 7) and just don’t get understand how this works. I have pulled all the YouTube videos and supplementary tools in this thread. But, can you advise anything else that can simplify this concept?
I found this resource online that may be helpful. The first half and the chart are the sections I liked best.
http://www.tntbasic.com/learn/help/guides/asciicodesexplained.htm
Ascii Codes Explained
Computers deal with numbers, not letters or punctuation, and so to get them to work with text we need to represent each and every character as a number.
The text files that you read and write are actually stored, loaded into memory and manipulated as a sequence of numbers. When the computer displays the data on screen as text, it changes the numbers into characters so that humans can understand it.
In order for text files to be reliably stored and processed by computers, it is important that they all interpret the data in the same way. To achieve this, a standardised mapping was created that defined what numbers should be used to represent all the characters in the english language. This mapping was called the American Standard for Information Interchange, or ASCII for short.
This will be my first year teaching Computer Science Principles and I wanted to ask your help in trying to understand something. The lesson plan for Unit 1 Lesson 7 says the following:
“Prompt: Imagine we wanted to create a system that would allow you to represent each of the 50 states. What’s the smallest number of bits you would need to ensure you’d have unique patterns for each state? Discuss as a whole class. Examples can be Alabama 000001, Colorado 010000, and so on. In this case the correct answer is that you need at least 6 bits which allows you to make 64 unique patterns, accommodating each of the 50 states. With fewer bits than this you do not have enough distinct patterns (there are only 32 5-bit patterns and only 16 4-bit patterns).”
I do not understand why we are mapping binary numbers to words (the names of the states) instead of mapping the binary numbers to the letters that form the names of the states. I am very confused. Could someone explain this to me? Don’t we just need enough patterns to represent the letters of the alphabet, so we can spell out the names of the states? This will be my first year teaching Computer Science Principles and I wanted to ask your help in trying to understand something. The lesson plan for Unit 1 Lesson 7 says the following:
“Prompt: Imagine we wanted to create a system that would allow you to represent each of the 50 states. What’s the smallest number of bits you would need to ensure you’d have unique patterns for each state? Discuss as a whole class. Examples can be “Alabama 000001”, “Colorado 010000” and so on.
In this case the correct answer is that you need at least 6 bits which allows you to make 64 unique patterns, accommodating each of the 50 states. With fewer bits than this you do not have enough distinct patterns (there are only 32 5-bit patterns and only 16 4-bit patterns).”
I do not understand why we are mapping binary numbers to words (the names of the states) instead of mapping the binary numbers to the letters that form the names of the states. I am very confused. Could someone explain this to me? Don’t we just need enough patterns to represent the letters of the alphabet, so we can spell out the names of the states?