First Day of School

 

All of a sudden, summer is over and the first day of school of my second year of teaching is here.

I was at school all day yesterday doing last minute prep and setting up my room. Since I teach in an IT LAB, the room is not only mine, but shared with teachers from other classes during the day. But I still like to put up student work to show off what we do in class. The back wall is now a display of work from last year including Photoshop posters, the winning 9th grade T-shirt design, a couple of the 3d printer project results and various other work. I think it looks good.

 

Mr. Olson in his CS&A classroom

Update on Summer

I’ve focused on completing my CS&A class the past week and am proceeding slowly. It’s really be slow going due to ‘competing priorities’. My goal is to have the first unit complete by the time I leave the US and an understanding in at least outline form of what I’ll do for the whole year. Since it is so similar to what I did last year in the first half of the year, I am taking the CSTA standard curriculum, Exploring Computer Science version 5.0 as my guide. I am adding version 3.0 activities as well as my own lesson plans where I see them as appropriate. 

My MS Computers class is getting less love. For them, I am using a computer curriculum I have found at CAS which involves much less computer science and more web apps for developing interest. It is much more focused on having the kids chart their own paths more or less. 

The one thing I haven’t done is create the ‘badges’ I talked about doing last year and replacing my assessment system with badges. That is still largely theoretical.

Curriculum Reboot

This summer I am rebooting my Computer Applications curriculum. Out of the millions and millions of resources I an reviewing Exploring Computer Science curriculum and the GenYes program to see how well these two can augment my existing  curriculum that I taught for the first time last year at ISA.

My first somewhat surprising finding is that I actually was not far off in what material I chose to cover last year. Many of the same topics and even exercises show up in both curriculums. Even if I made no changes to my curriculum, then I would cover many of the same topics and even activities covered in both of these example curriculum I am reviewing.

That's all well and good, but I really believe that computer literacy alone is not enough. Students need to know how computer systems, networks, and software work in order to remove the mystery. Students will benefit in their ability to learn other from learning "the computational thinking practices of algorithm development, problem solving and programming”.

So the purpose of my class is evolving. I still must cover the literacy component, but my goal of the class will be to give the students an introduction to computer science through activities and challenges and hope a few of them will see this as an interest they would like to pursue.

Since our school doesn’t offer IB CS classes, this is the last CS class they can take in HS, so it’s gotta be good.

More soon.

The End of My First Semester

We've finished the first semester and the two questions I'm asking myself are: "What did we accomplish?" and "What's next?"

I'll try to answer those questions in this post. First, what did we accomplish?

20th Century Computer History

Our first unit was a quick overview of 20th Century Computer History from Charles Babbage to Steve Jobs and from vacuum tubes to IC chips. In it we learned some of the major technologies, concepts and people who developed the digital world we find ourselves in today. We also learned that many of the same technologies from the earliest turn-of-the century computers are still with us today.

Digital Citizenship

Digital Citizenship - the ability to participate in society online - was combined with an office software intermediate skills unit to investigate how society is developing in the online world. Digital natives are shaping this brave new world in areas like commerce, law,etiquette and our rights and responsibilities towards each other. Students were asked to prepare an essay, develop a spreadsheet and present on an aspect of Digital Citizenship to the class focusing on any one of these areas and using some of the higher-level Office software skills presented in class.

Computer Hardware and Software

The longest amount of time was spend understanding how a computer works. We know data is stored in 1's and 0's. But what does that mean? It means, computers can only understand binary systems: on or off, yes or no, 1 or 0. So, we learned how to translate alphanumeric characters into binary strings that the computer can understand and are stored in multiple storage technologies like magnetic disks, optical disks, and solid state or flash drives. These strings of data form software - the instructions that a computer's CPU can execute.

The class was divided into teams of five and assigned a desktop computer they were instructed to dis-assemble. After inventorying all the major components by function, the teams developed mini-lesson videos that were shared with middle schoolers. After watching the videos, the middle schoolers were given a quiz that covered the topics presented in each video. How well they did gave some feedback to the teams on how well the video lesson was and indicated the level of understanding each team had of "How a Computer Works."

Reflection

I am not sure how well this exercise worked. While some groups did a good job creating a storyboard and a script, some were less detailed and created their performance while the video cameras rolled. Also, the theme "How a computer Works" was too broad. Better yet to narrow it down to "What are the CPU, RAM, and Storage..." or "What is the Van Neumann Architecture". Homestly, I am not sure they were given enough detail to really say "How a Computer Works".