Announcing: Curriculum Updates to Units 4 & 5 of CS Discoveries

CS Discoveries
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Announcing: Updates to Units 4 & 5

Our team has been hard at work on updates to the 2021-22 CS Discoveries curriculum. We’re excited to share a general timeline of our plans for rolling out these updates and to give you an exclusive preview!

What’s New?

For the 2021-22 curriculum, we’ve made updates to Unit 4: The Design Process and Unit 5: Data and Society. These lessons now have similar resources and structure as our updates to Units 1-3, including:

  • Unit slide decks, with slides for each lesson
  • Consistent lesson timings for a 45 minute instructional period
  • Consistent warm-up and wrap-up journal prompts
  • Question of the Day for each lesson

Many lessons also received smaller individual updates, but generally these lessons should still have a familiar feel to most activities with the same learning outcomes and culminating in the same projects as the 2020-21 curricula. You can find more details about changes to specific lessons in this changelog document.

A New Process: Beta Preview

We are planning to release these lessons and resources in a Beta Preview for any teacher interested in trying out the new materials in their classroom this year. Signing up for this preview will grant teachers access to the updated lesson plans and ability to assign the units to students, with the understanding that these lessons may still need improvements and that your feedback will be vital in that process.

We’ve heard from teachers that the slide decks for Units 1 - 3 have been invaluable during virtual teaching and at-home learning. Even though the slide decks for Units 4 and 5 are designed for the 2021-22 version of the curriculum, we anticipate they will be relevant and useful - with slight modifications - to fit lessons for this year’s version of the curriculum. Click here to view the lesson plans, including access to the Unit 4 and 5 slide deck.

Want to dig in? Here’s how to sign up:

  1. Click here to join the CSD 2021-22 Beta Preview. You must be using a verified teacher’s account.

  2. You can access the material and assign units to your students:
    a. Click Here to access the Unit 4 material and assign to your students
    b. Click Here to access the Unit 5 material and assign to your students
    c. [Edit: We had some issues with these links earlier today, but they should be fixed now! Have fun perusing the updated curriculum!]

  3. Proceed with the lessons!

Share your feedback!

Teacher feedback is incredibly valuable to us, and in the absence of piloting these lessons with students, we’d love your feedback on how these lessons feel in your classroom.

  • We’d love to hear your feedback on how these lessons feel in your classrooms and any improvements we can make - we anticipate making adjustments to timing estimates, the wording of instructions, and (of course) typos. All feedback is shared directly with our curriculum and professional learning teams.

Let us know if you have any questions by writing to teacher@code.org.

Thank you!

Code.org Curriculum Team

3 Likes
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When I followed the link to sign up I received an error message. Yes, logged in, yes, verified teacher account.

Unknown experiment name ‘csd-2021-preview’."

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Agree with the item above, please let us know!

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Same problem. Unknown experiment name ‘csd-2021-preview’.

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I am seeing the same error as the others when trying to sign up for the Beta version of CSD.
Thanks!

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Hi Folks! So sorry for this - the link has been updated to give the correct amount of access. Please try again!

-Dan

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Do I/we need to sign up, or just leave comments about units 4 and 5

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The changelog link shows access denied.

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Oh no! So sorry - thanks for bringing that to our attention. I just updated the link - should work now!

-Dan

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Also, I am not sure how you assign these new units to students. I know I can just copy the link and send it to them but can I make the unit show as what they should be working on when they login to code.org and if so then how?

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Same here. I can see the Lesson Plans, but how to do I assign these to the students.

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I was able to access the levels in Code Studio yesterday, but now the tabs
turn completely blank if I try to load those direct links

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Hello @lvasquez ! So sorry for this - an update happened overnight that slightly changed this process. To fix this, here’s what you can do:

  • Click here to join the CSD 2021-22 Beta Preview. You must be using a verified teacher’s account.
  • This should take you to the main Code Studio page with a small green box that says you’ve successfully joined the 2021-preview
  • After that, you should be able to access the same links as before:
    a. Click Here to access the Unit 4 material and assign to your students
    b. Click Here to access the Unit 5 material and assign to your students
1 Like
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Hello @cparson and @michelle.anding! Here’s how you can assign these courses to students:

  • Click here to join the CSD 2021-22 Beta Preview. You must be using a verified teacher’s account.
  • This should take you to the main Code Studio page with a small green box that says you’ve successfully joined the 2021-preview
  • After that, these course should appear in the drop-down menu as assignable to students in your classroom sections. You’ll need to scroll to the bottom and look in the “other” section:
    image
    image1084×384 32.3 KB

Hope that helps!

Dan - Code.org Curriculum Writer

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Thanks so much! This is awesome!

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Hey Dan I keep looking through this forum and cannot find slides for unit 6…any chance you can steer me that direction?

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Hi @dlauterb !

We currently don’t have slides for Unit 6. I’d recommend looking around on the forum to see if other teachers have created slides for this unit.

Cheers,
Dan Schneider
Curriculum Writer