An Inside Look at the New CodeHS Indiana Computing Foundations for a Digital Age Course

hello everyone welcome thank you for joining us yes as people are coming in we'll just wait for everybody else we'll get started in a few moments okay I think we can see if more people start joining but I kind of see the the big stream of people join already so we'll kick it off just so we don't run out of time here this is the Indiana Computing foundations for a digital age course webinar we'll be talking about the course and any resources that we have for it and then we'll have like kind of a a Q&A style session afterwards so let's take a look I'll be presenting today I was part of the team that built the course so I do curriculum here at cods I'm joined by kit Lauren and Rachel my colleagues let them introduce themselves hi everyone my name is kit Ward I'm on the marketing team here at cods I'm Lauren Nelson and I'm part of the account management team at COD HS hi everyone I'm Rachel Reed I'm part of the customer success team here at code HS well thank you and so yeah so they they'll be here to answer questions for you all certainly I'll I'll be doing the same so feel free to ask any questions that that you have taking a look at the agenda we'll first go over the course so take a look at a high level and then we'll break into some of the actual modules and activities that are in the course we'll go over where you can access these materials we'll do a bit of a Q&A and then towards the end we'll share any resources that we have so this is making use of a webinar Q&A so you should see this button at the bottom of your toolbar if you have any questions feel free to add them in there and either my my team will answer them as I'm presenting or I'll get to them when I have when I take a break yeah and if you need an account you could go to Cod / signup and get yourself an account so you can access the course and just a bit of an overview of cods we're a a comprehensive platform for teaching computer science in the K through2 system so we provide the curriculum offline and online PD and then the full platform for that has teacher tools for grading and and delivering lessons a little bit more of what of the platform is has has extensive grading tracking tools new AI tools and yeah it's fully web based so it's you can get it all on the site and jumping into the course itself as you all or may know or may not know the course has a variety of different concepts so it really covers everything from Computing systems to networks to data analysis and then programming algorithms and then impacts of computing so is a lot of different concepts in this course we think it's it's a really fun one it's very engaging just because of the variety and the different things that students get to do so it it is a one semester long course and what we will do now is look at the actual modules that are in the course so we have a total of seven and those are the following so we have cyber security andu this is where we start the the students off with really showing them or having them expl how to navigate the the internet and and things online they look at Computing systems learning kind of like what operating system is and taking a look at computers under the hood they move into it Concepts and then they do a project called it professionals where they kind of wrap up this first half of the course with with a project and then they move into python fundamentals where they begin programming in Python and then they do data analysis and research in the data science life cycle and then they wrap up the course with a final project so in total seven modules two two projects and then there are some supplemental modules that we'll look at after these main modules that teachers can sort of decide whether to to add them in or not but we we'll get to those in a bit so like I said we start off with cyber security and U for each of these modules have a few activities that are kind of in in the module I just have them pasted here so they do an activity where students follow a guide to kind of follow to understand whether a resource or something that they're interacting with online can be trusted or not and so this can be confusing especially in in today's times and so we kind of help them explore and decide these things for themselves they do a search challenge where they find a resource and evaluate it if it's trustworthy or not and then we start introducing them already to the rise of AI and is risks and as well as the the benefits so as we know in the in the framework and standards for this course there is some mentioning of AI so we started off right at the beginning of the course and then we move into Computing systems here students learn about application software operating systems and hardware and kind of the relationship and how these different Technologies work with each other and so they they analyze a computer and the different programs that that it can run and then they simulate a an operating systems an update of an operating system so yeah really they just get into what Computing is and all the way down from the hardware level to the the software that runs a computer and then all the application software that can be ran on top of that so they get introduced to a lot of computing Concepts here in it Concepts they'll move into learning about networks and different kind of kind of computing but for the the internet so they'll learn more about how routers work and modems and how they connect to the internet at a technical level so there's a fun activity where they get to decide where they can place their router and where it makes the most sense in terms of getting the the best connection possible and so this is this is a cool activity that they can do simply just online on the platform but it can also be taken as an unplugged activity where if they have a router either at home or maybe there's something similar like that in the classroom they can move it around and see how that impacts the connection that they have their internet connection that they're able to to to have so it's a cool for fun activity can be done in multiple different ways and then they also learn what a a server room looks like and so we have this tool that is hosted and and ran by Microsoft where you can actually go into one of their servers and identify it's kind of like a simulation you get to walk in and and see really what they actually look like and identify different components so this is kind of like a real world connection where they look at you you know one of the leading Computing companies and and what their servers look like so it's it's really cool you feel like you're in there is really immersive so it's it's going to be a cool experience for students yeah after that module they'll move into a project called it professionals where they take on the the role of an IT professional and it's kind of centered around this project of troubleshooting and solving issues for customers or users for their hypothetical company or or product and so they go through yeah what one of the main activities is going through this support ticket system which we're all familiar with here at at codhs this is very relevant to our work so it's it's a good experience for for students as well to kind of see what what what like companies use in the real world so yeah they kind of go through this then there are different iterations of it but they kind of take on this role and then they do a presentation at the end of this project with with this with the short video so this is a fun one gets them away from programming and like computer related things and more industry related activities from there they the course kind of takes a bit of a pivot to more programming Concepts this will be kind of the first place where they're introduced to actual programming and some of the modules that we just covered there are activities where students learn about kind of like variables like pseudo code but not specific to any programming language once they get to python fundamentals they will begin writing code and here's just an exercise where students ask for input of the user as they try to collect information about a recipe that the user knows then there are some standards around algorithm analysis or comparing different algorithms in this framework so we have this tool where students can explore s sort of interactively what different algorithms do in terms of how how they're able to sort things efficiently or search for different items efficiently so this is a very highlevel approach to to covering this material we know that students at this level should be beginner programming beginners at programming at computer science so they're they're not expected to know a bunch of technical information as is usual with sorting and and searching they can be pretty heavy on the programming side this is just a high level exploration of of that and so they get to see cool visualizations of of U how things could be sorted and also they look at complexity analysis there is a mention of complexity analysis in the standard so we cover that and all of this is explored through a guided handout so students do have a handout and teachers also have a handout with Solutions as they go through this this exploration just a really cool interactive tool it's just one of the the funner ones they also again going back to artificial intelligence they compare AI algorithms or approaches to solving problems to traditional algorithms so here in in this interactive activity they kind of move this point that you see there in the middle they can move it left or right up or down and then when they hit train model and then classify the new Point it'll either turn blue or red depending on where the model thinks that it belongs or in which group it belongs to and so this is a cool way to illustrate that AI is really about data and patterns and that's how it solves its problems and then traditional algorithms are more kind of repeating steps or following step-by-step instructions that a program programmer writes so another cool interactive activity that they get to explore some of these more abstract level Concepts from there they move into the data science life cycle and by default we have a lot of Google Sheets exercises so students will be interacting with sheets to do data analysis are creating data visualizations in this module as they work through the data science life cycle so here just an example of kind of includes a lot of what students do in this module they'll obviously GA gather data be able to analyze it they'll get like the mean median and modes sort of the statistical measures they'll create pivot tables charts and kind of learning what charts make sense in which situation and then just drawing conclusions from these different the data that they work with and apart from just working with data itself they have some interactive activities as well where they kind of learn about different data so it's not just all in spreadsheets and stuff like how how is this data collected and this is just one example is we use a thermometer for you know to to to relate to a real world situation that draws readings and then we can then get those readings and turn them into into data and they learn about these different data formats there's not just tables and spreadsheets you could do things with Json XML and csvs and things like that so another cool interactive activity that students get to use I'm see some chats okay cool moving on yeah and that kind of wraps up that that module and B really the the chunk of the course and kind of what students do they wrap it up with a final project that tries to combine as much of the the main Concepts that they go through in the course all in one project so students do some research on a topic that they want gather some data write a Python program that either simulates a situation or a solution to this topic and then as a group they also present their their findings and so this final project really is open-ended and students get to create something that they're really that they're interested in yeah and it's all based on things that they learned previously in the course and that sort of wraps up the main modules in this course we do have two supplemental two main supplemental modules in the course that will kind of help teachers to want to add a little bit of modularity to to the course and the first one is Carol and python so we understand that sometimes a very graphical interface is more more engaging for students kind of in the main course right now they start off with console-based python so it's just writing code and then interacting with the console if you want a more graphical experience we do have Carol so this will be in supplemental and if you were to pull this in it could either be at the beginning of the course or before the the other python content and then we have data science with python as well so if you don't want to use Google Sheets or or spreadsheets in general there is data science with python so here students import data into the editor and then write python code to kind of do their analysis and so this is probably more for advanced students or students that can kind of f figure things out indiv independently but also it could could be a fun one you could do a mix of both it's really up to teachers we wanted to just include this to have a different option from from working with spreadsheets and so these two are in supplemental and can be added to the course okay and that kind of wraps up the course the main modules and the supplemental modules in the course how to access it we do have it launched already on the site so you could head over to CSC course 24106 overview and get access to the material so you can poke around and explore yourself or there's also and then there's also the syllabus where you can learn more about kind of in-depth the different modules and the approach to to the course but yeah we're super excited to have this launched and ready for you all to access