CS Discoveries Has Been Updated!
We’ve been busy working for the past several months on revisions to our core pathway of courses, including increased opportunities to assess student learning, updated tools for students to create expressive projects, and more. Here’s a rundown of the improvements you’ll find in CS Discoveries 19-20.
Supporting Assessment
The name of the game for CS Discoveries over the past year has been assessment. In order to help teachers better understand what students should be learning in the course, we’ve developed learning frameworks for each of the units that provide a high level view of the learning outcomes that we’re building towards and show mappings to the CSTA standards where appropriate. Those frameworks also serve as a grounding point for our redesigned project rubrics and post-project tests. Speaking of post-project tests - we wrote post-project tests! These are short assessments that combine multiple choice and free response questions aligned to the unit learning frameworks and connected to each end of unit project.
Marked Assessment Opportunities
We’ve also marked assessment opportunities for every learning objective in each lesson, with extra guidance for evaluating student mastery. For assessment in programming levels, our new feedback tab includes a mini-rubric that teachers, as well as a text box for teachers to share qualitative feedback. Learn more our mini-rubrics in this article.
New Teacher Guides
We designed CS Discoveries with flexibility of implementation in mind, but we’ve found that it’s not always clear how best to make the course fit difference scenarios, nor is it obvious how to use all of the resources and materials available. To help teachers through this we’ve created a handful of new resources to help teachers get started, included a Getting Started Guide, an Implementation Guide, and an Assessment Guide.
And More!
We’ve also added…
- Discussion questions for each video
- A “Help and Tips” tab to quickly link students to relevant programming resources
- Updated videos, and a few completely new ones
- Various changes to activities and instructions as requested by teachers
You can read a detailed log of all changes for 19-20 here.
Thanks for making this possible!
Thank you to everyone who gave us feedback this year, whether through our focus groups, bug reports, forum posts, surveys, or any other channel. We hope all of our teachers enjoy these updates, and we look forward to hearing from you on how we can continue to make this course better for you and your students!
Elizabeth
