CS9

🔚 Final Project

12 Jan 2017

⏳ Hour of Code

Every single student in your grade has written code…but many of your teachers have no idea what code even is.

That’s where you come in.

You are going to design a lesson to teach the only group of learners in this school that haven’t coded: your teachers.

You will have one hour to teach them the most essential ideas of coding, using the coding language of your choice– or no language at all. Maybe make some PB&J? I don’t know, you’re the teacher. I’m going to sit down…

(For the rest of this assignment, when I say “student” I mean everyone who isn’t in this class.)

🌈 Understanding by Design

When we start thinking about planning a lesson, we try to start with the end first.

What should a student leaving your lesson be able to do when you’re done teaching them that day?

For this semester, these were mine:

🤔 Essential Questions

  • What is a program?
  • How are programs organized?
  • How are different types of data used in programming?
  • How can I solve problems using code?

💡 Enduring Understandings

  • Algorithms are precise sequences of instructions for processes that can be executed by a computer and are implemented using programming languages.
  • A computer program is a sequence of instructions or steps, written in a language that can be understood by a computer, that will be used by the computer to complete a task or solve a problem
  • Creativity is essential process for creating programs.
  • Computing enables us to use our creativity to create programs for creative expression or to solve a problem.
  • Multiple levels of abstraction are used to write programs
  • Programs can be developed for creative expression, to satisfy personal curiosity, to create new knowledge, or to solve problems (to help people, organizations, or society).
  • Programming uses mathematical and logical concepts.

That’s a lot. The next step is to determine the evidence that tells the teacher whether or not students have mastered the material.

I developed 🎯 Learning Targets for this class. Do you remember the 👌 SNAP Learning Target Tracker or the 🐍 Python Learning Target Tracker? Those are assessments.

📝 Assessment

Assessments are evidence. You’re used to seeing them as tests or exit slips, but they’re also reflections, rubrics, conversations, code you submit, drawings…whatever shows a teacher you’ve mastered an idea or a skill.

Any good lesson includes formative assessment that occurs while people are learning and allows you to see where they’re getting confused and need help (or where they are destroying the work and need to pushed harder (👋 pretty much each of you at some point this semester).

Teachers also use summative assessments at the end of a unit, usually comparing students to a baseline or grade standards.

You will only be teaching for one day (at least for now), so you probably won’t be giving a test. BUT – you still need to think about assessment.

Some questions I ask myself:

1⃣ How do I know students are learning while I’m teaching? How do I know where they’re stuck?

2⃣ How many students are meeting my standards? How many are exceeding and need an extension?

3⃣ What can I adjust, right now, based on this information?

4⃣ What’s next?

🎉 Activity

Now it’s time to begin planning what students will actually do in order to meet the objectives you set for them, as measured by your assessments.

This is completely backwards from how most people think about preparing to teach. If I asked you to plan a lesson yesterday, you probably would’ve started thinking about what activities you wanted your students to do. You might have thought about what projects you liked best from the last 3.5 years…or maybe ones that would make your teachers struggle and feel dumb.

Planning

Date Deliverable
1/12 QFT
1/13 🎯 Learning Targets & Assessment
1/17 Activity Planning
1/18 Activity
1/19 Lesson Plan
1/23 🎓 Teach!

🎯 Learning Targets

  • Most important concepts in coding
  • What can be learned in an hour?
  • What makes this class different?
  • What makes this class the same?

📝 Assessment

  • Coding + documentation/reflection
  • What does “getting it” look like?

🎉 Activity

  • Language (Scratch/SNAP/Python/etc or unplugged)
  • Timing
  • Groupings

Lesson Plan Template