What to Leave Out (curriculum wise)?

CS Principles Virtual and Distance Learning
1

Hi, I am teaching CSP asynchronously in a remote environment. There is NO way I can get through the amount of content and curriculum I should. My classes have been cut by an hour a week. Can anyone recommend any lessons/units to cut? I want to make sure I am optimizing the curriculum the best way possible and only cut what wouldn’t be missed by the students. I would appreciate any ideas, help, or what you have done with the curriculm.

Thank you,
Susan

2

Hi Susan,

Can you give us a little more context about your class? Are you teaching this as an AP course? Do you have students all year?

Best,
Madeline

3

Hi Madeline,

I am not teaching it as an AP course. It is a semester long course and I would like to get through as much of the content as possible, but I don’t want to leave out any important content. I was hoping that it would be possible to skip a lesson here and there to be able to cover most of the content, minus the AP PTasks.

4

Also, we don’t start until Sept. 1st which means we have lost 3 weeks as well.

5

Hi Susan,

Right now, the content to lesson ratio is pretty streamlined. Yes, content is spiraled in, but most lessons introduce new content to the students. You may find that you can merge two lessons together. For example in the first unit, there is the lesson on binary numbers with the flippy do, and then a lesson that we talk about overflow and representing numbers with decimals in binary. You could choose to merge the ‘big concepts’ of those two lessons, but probably wouldn’t have time to touch upon every aspect. Some of the lessons in the EIPM sequence for units 4, 5, and 7 might be merged in an asynchronous form because asynchronous discussions tend to take up less individual work time. (Though I would definitely encourage you to use the video guides so students don’t just race through these lessons and ‘do the actions’ without thinking about them.) If you preview the lessons for the upcoming week or two as you go, I bet you’ll find more moments like this that will fit well together for you. Given that you don’t have the AP to think about, you can make those choices as you desire!

I think more realistically though, after a week or two of class you’re going to have a better feel for the speed of your content and what you can get through in your asynchronous time ‘together’. And that will allow you to make these cuts for yourself.