CS D Survey, CS Express and CS Discovery

CS Discoveries
1

I am wondering if this is a good plan.

  1. I give the students the csd survey

  2. I get the students to do and complete the cs express course (from the cs fundamentals)

  3. I get the students to do and complete the csd course.

  4. I then ask the students to do the csd post course survey.

Our school has not taught the cs fundamentals for grade 6 to grade 8 students and I am thinking of asking them to do the cs express (part of cs fundamentals) first.

I would have 3 years with the grade 6 students, 2 years with the grade 7 students and 1 year with grade 8 students. Students are progressing so fast, then the students might complete the cs discovery way ahead of schedule and I will have to plan more units for them.

Any comments?

2

I’ll chime in. It probably depends on how long you have the students. Do you have them for one semester, or an entire year or a different time frame. … If I had the students every day for three years, I probably would have them start with the Express course or the “Accelerated Course” (20 hour course), but for CS Discoveries, I would perhaps choose two units for each year I had them.

Some of the units could be stretched out as well. I find personally that unit 3 can take longer than the suggested time frame by code.org, especially when the students get into their games and want to keep working at making them better. I just wouldn’t rush them.

You could also expand unit 2 if they got pretty good at their web pages and teach them some stuff outside of the curriculum (like how to add Google Fonts to their projects).

That way, I would have enough material to go for that long. Still, though, if you do have them every day for three years, you may have to find other things to add to fill the extra time.

If you only had them one semester for 3 years, I think the plan I outlined above would work well (at least for my students).

Anyone else have that concern? … I often wish I had more time than I do with my students!

Mike

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3

Hi,

Thanks for the insights. I love the plan for 2 units (of cs discovery) a year for the grade 6.

I just started teaching in a new school and the school is now offering computing to all the students from grade 6 to grade 8. The students did not have coding classes last year. So I have different time frames for different grades this year.

My intention is to set up so that at steady state (3 years from now), students would have done cs fundamentals in grade 1 to grade 5, and the students would do cs discovery from grade 6 to grade 8.

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