I am curious as to everyone’s thoughts on the AI Foundations Course.
I am not a fan of it, at all in fact, and I’ve been with Code.org for a long time. For me, it’s being used as curriculum for a required freshmen level course and it’s much too difficult for my students. While some students do grasp it, many are frustrated by the complexity of it including myself.
Couple of things:
Unit 1 had some really fantastic lessons but it was much too repetitive and it missed out on some opportunities to do some cool lessons regarding training data. Also, there were some missed opportunities for some fun projects utilizing AI.
In my opinion, Unit 2 is fantastic for an upper-level course. Some issues I had with it:
Moved much too quickly as an foundational level course.
Parameters
Passing objects as parameters
Importing user-created functions
While I am being critical of the course, I do think it’s well-done. But for me, it’s just much too difficult as a foundational-level course for freshmen.
I am new to code.org and decided to try just Unit 2 for doing Python Programming., ”Unit 2 - Foundations of AI Programming”.
We are just part way into Lesson 3 and I would say it has been a disaster so far.
I’ll have to spend some time putting together some constructive feedback but it has been super confusing for myself and the students jumping from the platform to the workbook to additional pieces. I know whoever designed it really wants us to print it out, but if you don’t and try to do things electronically it seems to be a big confusing mess.
I feel like the exercises need more examples before jumping into them and some of them seem too ambiguous. The baking a cake exercise had you classifying things but they are very vague and could fit into more than one category, I feel like a bunch of straightforward ones to start with and an example first would make sense. Then maybe do some more ambiguous examples (or not).
I’m trying to decide if I should just cut my losses and drop using code.org and do it from scratch, OR if I will go through each following lesson really carefully and update them all.
Maybe it will get better when it goes into just coding but so far we have all been struggling.
I agree about the Activity Guides - I just can’t print them out for all my students nearly everyday, it’s just too much. Not to mention the Unit Guide as well.
As a devoted code.org user since 2016’s TeacherCon I’m getting similar vibes. I feel like the Python coding levels are rushed - it’s the equivalent of multiple units of CSP coding, squished into one. My kids are struggling, and since I’m learning Python along with them I’m not in a position to create the supports that they need.
I popped over to look at the CSP units, but it’s going to be a lot of work to build that level of support for the Python lessons.
I was planning on giving the students a brief tour of the “Python Lab Documentation” and official Python documentation.
The lab docs could certainly use some improvement. The Painter docs should have at least the following added:
summary of all the methods and Attributes at the beginning
show a basic usage of the Painter
it calls Attributes “Fields”, it should use the correct terminology and be consistent with the slides
Other parts of the docs:
it has all these sections, but they are blank:
Python Lab Shortcuts
Mac: Advanced Commands
Mac: Basic Commands
Windows: Advanced Commands
Windows: Basic Commands
The Lab docs don’t cover all the material in the lessons such as Variables, Data Types, Objects, Loops, Conditionals. It feels like big chunks are missing.
You’re absolutely right it feels rushed. I am teaching parameters to freshmen who are forced into the class because my state is requiring it before I am teaching it to my AP students.
I think it’s important for me to say that I have been a devote Code.org teacher since the beginning but I am finding it difficult to use this curriculum for my needs. And for the record, it appears this curriculum was built specifically for my state’s required course.
I noticed the attributes stuff as well. Maybe those chunks are missing because the course just rolled out and they will begin to add to it? I’m not sure.
I am almost through the entire semester and I would agree that the pacing is off on some lessons. We have block classes and if found that many of the Unit 2 lessons really needed the full 90 minutes instead of the advertised 45 minutes. Other lessons in other units needed far less than the 45 minutes allotted. I find that if there is too much down time, behavior issues arise.
That being said, next semester, I plan to slow down Unit 2 and take a little more time. I think that will help a lot with comprehension.
I too have been using Code.org for a long time. I completed most of Unit 1 and skipped to Unit 3. I have 9-12 and found the students were confused by questions and finished early often. They students who have a better grasp of AI already did a decent job, but not sure they learned too much new and the less tech savvy did not seem to get the point. I went back to CSD for now.
When my school looked at the curriculum during the last school year it was different from what was released. That may have set expectations wrong for the course we got. As I recall the original vision had a larger slice of programming. This course has a lot about computer hardware.
There is nothing wrong with teaching children how to use and be wary of AI. But I was also expecting to see at least some fundamentals of the math behind the LLMs. Google has Teachable Machine that could be used in a curriculum like AI Fundamentals. Even code.org has the curriculum on training AI to detect ocean pollution.
I just started trying to use Code.org today. I am having issues with Unit 1, Lesson 1, specifically level 2 Next Steps. To me, these next steps assume my students and I are more experienced than we are. I am unclear about what the output should be on the step 2. I would assume if I had AI to create a webpage with just CSS, I wouldn’t see anything because the code would just be different style features and no content. I wish I had someone I could call or someone who is quick to respond that I could email. I really want to stick this one out.
I’m so sorry that this was frustrating! I’ll do my best to help if I can. Your post is in the AI foundations course, and I do not recognize this screenshot from level 2 of lesson 1, Talking to Machines.
Can you share a link to the level you’re looking at?
Hmm, I don’t know anything about that one. Let me reach out to the curriculum team to see if we can either create a forum section for it, or get someone from the pilot team to monitor the forum to answers questions directly.
