It is my intent to teacher CS in Algebra during the next school year. I have hear that I could possibly be teaching a couple sections of Social Studies. I found this course to be very motivating for very unsuccessful middle school math students. They enjoyed the collaborative nature of using partner pairs–where in other classes they seem to fight working in pairs or small groups. There is an adjustment to our administration for the upcoming school year, so nothing can be planned too far in advance. I do know that this will be an 8th grade class and part of my computer programming / 3D graphics class.
I’m going to attend Exploring Computer Science training this summer, and also plan on rolling out Algebra to my sixth graders and science to my 7th and 8th graders.
I plan to use the bootstrap text-based curriculum with my 8th grade students who are taking Algebra and Geometry next year. My plan is to implement the curriculum in the spring after our state testing.
It is important that in our K-8 school, the CS skills and vocabulary are taught at each grade level. This way students are building upon their knowledge and with each year their proficiency improves. I plan to work with my principal to secure teachers in the lower grades to teach the fundamental skills and vocabulary. I would like to work with 7th and 8th graders on CS in Algebra and use the option of splitting CS in Algebra into two courses. This way in the eighth grade I can take the students deeper into the CS concepts, from block base to text based coding.
I would like to offer Course A to the 7th graders and then work with our 8th grade to do the game and focus on quadratic equations.