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The class learns about collision detection on the computer. Pairs explore how a computer could use sprite location, size properties, and math to detect whether two sprites are touching. The class then uses the isTouching() block to create different effects when sprites collide, including playing sounds. Last, they use their new skills to improve the sidescroller game that they started in the last lesson.

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In Storytelling, students use computer science to tell fun and interactive stories. Storytelling emphasizes creativity by encouraging students to tell a unique story each day.

Storytelling is a complete theme designed to be completed over eight, 45-75 minute sessions. For each Activity, students will watch a series of videos and create one coding project with opportunities to personalize their work using “Add-Ons”, which are mini-coding challenges that build on top of the core project.

This Unit Plan consists of eight activities to be completed over multiple days or weeks. 

Be sure to review the Materials tab for the lesson plan, starter guide, and more. 

Users will need a Google account to use this resource. 

With recent reports of high profile data breaches, ransomware attacks, and the prevalence of online trackers, it’s hard to know how best to protect your privacy online. In this Above the Noise video, we met up with the cybersecurity experts at Electronic Frontier Foundation to learn more about who’s snooping on us online and what we can do to protect ourselves. This video comes with a student handout that helps guide the discussion of this activity.

With recent high-profile security decryption cases, encryption is more important than ever. Much of your browser usage and your smartphone data is encrypted. But what does that process actually entail? And when computers get smarter and faster due to advances in quantum physics, how will encryption keep up? This video can be played during a lesson on identifying common methods of securing data.

Paper prototypes allow developers to quickly test ideas before investing a lot of time writing code. In this lesson, teams explore some example apps created in App Lab, using those apps to help inform the first paper prototypes of their apps.

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Computers are machines that do stuff with information. They let you view, listen, create, and edit information in documents, images, videos, sound, spreadsheets, and databases. They let you play games in simulated worlds that don’t really exist except as information inside the computer’s memory and displayed on the screen. They let you compute and calculate with numerical information; they let you send and receive information over networks. Fundamental to all of this is that the computer has to represent that information in some way inside the computer’s memory, as well as storing it on disk or sending it over a network.

To make computers easier to build and keep them reliable, everything is represented using just two values. You may have seen these two values represented as 0 and 1, but on a computer, they are represented by anything that can be in two states. For example, in memory, a low or high voltage is used to store each 0 or 1. On a magnetic disk, it's stored with magnetism (whether a tiny spot on the disk is magnetized north or south).

This chapter will examine how data is stored on computers, be it text, images, colors, etc. 

Cyber-bullying is where one or more person targets another through technology such as the Internet, cell phones, or other devices to threaten, harass, or embarrass another person. Cyber-bullying goes beyond just bullying because it can follow you home (e.g., through text or e-mail messages, blogs, social networking web site, etc.). You can stop cyber-bullying by not responding to any of it, saving the evidence, and reporting it.

When students run into a barrier while answering a question or working on a project, it’s so easy for them to get frustrated and give up. This lesson will introduce students to the idea that frustration can be an important part of learning. Here, frustration is presented as a step in the creative process, rather than a sign of failure.

This lesson can be done over one or two class sessions. If you have more time, feel free to draw out the building and revising phase of the Marble Run activity. The goal of this lesson is to help students realize that failure and frustration are common when working on projects, but that doesn't mean that they should give up. In this lesson, students will develop an understanding of what it means to be frustrated while working on a large project. It's possible that not every student will experience frustration with this activity, but there are many opportunities to open a discussion about moments in the past where students have felt frustrated but nevertheless persisted.

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As our students create more and more digital products—blog posts, videos, podcasts, e-books—they should be using images to enhance them. Images grab an audience’s attention, they can illustrate key concepts, set a certain tone, and present a more complete understanding of the ideas you’re putting out there.

And the internet is absolutely teeming with images students can grab and use in a matter of seconds. But in most cases, they SHOULD NOT GRAB. Despite the fact that these images are easy to get, using them may be illegal.

Use the information in this blog post to teach students to either create their own images or legally use images found online, including proper citation. 

In this video segment from FRONTLINE: "Digital Nation" teens talk about why they use social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. This video comes with discussion questions.

Students learn to draw images by looping simple sequences of instructions. In the previous online lesson, loops were used to traverse a maze and collect treasure. Here, students use loops to create patterns. At the end of this stage, students will be given the opportunity to create their own images using loops.

This lesson gives a different perspective on how loops can create things in programming. Students will test their critical thinking skills by evaluating given code and determining what needs to be added in order to solve the puzzle. Students can also reflect on the inefficiency of programming without loops here because of how many blocks the program would require without the help of repeat loops.

Students will be able to:
- Count the number of times an action should be repeated and represent it as a loop.
- Decompose a shape into its largest repeatable sequence.
- Create a program that draws complex shapes by repeating simple sequences.

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Your challenge is to open the Cyber Safe by completing Quests to help make the connection between the real world and the digital world. The decisions made in your digital world affect you as much as those made in the real world. In fact, your digital decisions and behaviors can affect you more and for longer than decisions made in the real world--even with prospective employers and college applications!

Earn your Cyber Safety Expert badge by successfully completing the Quests and cracking the cyber safe.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

When you have completed this activity you will:

1. know how to be safe while on the Internet [Digital Citizen]

2. understand online etiquette [Digital Citizen]

3. understand the impact of online bullying [Digital Citizen]

It’s time to use interactive tools to your advantage. Interactive websites are designed to help you learn through simulations and interaction. You will be learning about interactive websites through a series of three Quests. Good luck!

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

When you have completed this activity you will:

1. know about interactive websites and resources [Empowered Learner]

2. understand the different types of interactive learning [Empowered Learner]

3. understand how to use geographical information [Computational Thinker]

We’re going to take our first baby steps from hardware into software! Using that CPU we built last episode, The Central Processing Unit: Computer Science Crash Course #7, we’re going to run some instructions and walk you through how a program operates on the machine level. We'll show you how different programs can be used to perform different tasks, and how software can unlock new capabilities that aren't built into the hardware.

This lesson is a student's first exposure to programming in App Lab. The lesson begins with a quick reflection prompt. Then students are introduced to the practice of pair programming before beginning to program. For this lesson, the students' view is limited to only a very few simple “turtle” commands to draw graphics on the screen. After a few warm-up exercises, using only combinations of four drawing commands, students must figure out the most “efficient” way to draw an image of a 3x3 grid. The lesson concludes with a sense-making discussion about the meaning of efficiency in programming and the reason behind beginning with such a limited set of programming tools.

Students will be able to:
- use App Lab to write programs that create simple drawings with “turtle graphics.”
- create a program with a partner following the pair programming model.
- explain different ways one might measure the efficiency of a program.

Note: You will need to create a free account on code.org before you can view this resource.

A layered graphic helps students understand how a news story goes from raw information – the source – to their newsfeed or text chain; then students zero in on sources in real-life news stories.

You are in need of Fact Finder: Your Foolproof Guide to Media Literacy’s 11 flexible, multimedia lesson plans to tackle these challenges. Eight skill-building lesson plans introduce essential media literacy concepts through engaging explainer videos and colorful infographics that help students revisit, retain and apply the key concepts. The accompanying News or Noise? Media Map provides a collection of examples ready for students to analyze and evaluate with the support of worksheets and discussion prompts. Three reporting lesson plans help students take what they’ve learned and apply it to their own content creation, inspired by the issues that matter to them.

A layered graphic helps students understand how a news story goes from raw information – the source – to their newsfeed or text chain; then students zero in on sources in real-life news stories.

You will need to create a free account to access this lesson plan. 

We’re going to step back from hardware and software, and take a closer look at how the backdrop of the cold war and space race and the rise of consumerism and globalization brought us from huge, expensive codebreaking machines in the 1940s to affordable handhelds and personal computers in the 1970s. This is an era that saw huge government-funded projects - like the race to the moon. And afterward, a shift towards the individual consumer, commoditization of components, and the rise of the Japanese electronics industry.

In this lesson, students add variables to two different exemplary apps to keep track of a score or a count of some number of button clicks. The major topic is variable in scope and understanding the differences, benefits, and drawbacks, of using global versus local variables. This lesson focuses more on using global variables since in event-driven apps that’s what you need to keep track of data across multiple events.

The very basics of a simple if statement are also presented in this lesson, mostly to highlight the difference between the = and == operators. Finally, students are asked to apply what they’ve learned about variables, scope, and if statements, to make their own “clicker” game modeled after one of the exemplars they saw during the lesson.

Students will be able to:
- use global variables to track numeric data in an app.
- give a high-level explanation of what “variable scope” means.
- debug problems related to variable scoping issues.
- modify existing programs to add and update variables to track information.
- create a multi-screen "clicker" game from scratch.

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Even if you’re not actively using the Internet, someone else may be sharing information about you — intentionally or unintentionally. So, avoiding the Internet does not guarantee privacy.

The lesson elements in this module teach students about the privacy principle: “You can’t avoid having an information footprint by not going online”. They are designed to be independent and flexible, so you can incorporate them into any size lesson plan. Student resources are available at https://teachingprivacy.org/you-cant-escape/. 

Summary of Learning Objectives: Students can enumerate ways their offline activities generate data that is stored and shared online; students can communicate effectively with others about everyone’s information-sharing preferences.

Target Age: High school, college undergraduate.

Learning Objectives:

1. Students can explain why abstaining from online activities is not an effective strategy for maintaining online privacy.
2. Students can give examples of how someone’s information footprint could be impacted by the online activities of others, including how information about someone’s offline activities might end up online.
3. Students can give examples of ways that information in someone’s digital footprint that was not created by them could still be used against them.
4. Students can describe how they would apply privacy tools provided on social networking sites to minimize unwanted posts by others about their activities.
5. Students can investigate what information is being shared about them online by devices and services they use and organizations they participate in, and use privacy settings or opt-out mechanisms to limit that sharing.
6. Students can describe how they would approach discussing their privacy preferences with their friends and family to minimize unwanted information-sharing.

Manuela Veloso is an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher from Carnegie Mellon University who programs small robot dogs to play soccer. Her primary goal is to increase the learning abilities of her robots. This video can be played for students as an introduction to a lesson on artificial intelligence.

Students have an opportunity to create an outstanding Readers Theatre performance within groups to compete for the title of Reading Idol. Students are given scripts to practice their roles within Readers Theatre. Throughout the week, groups practice repeatedly until the performance day. On the performance day, students take turns performing and evaluating their own work and the performances of other groups before voting on a winning performance. All groups are required to create a podcast of their performance. The Reading Idol winners are also recorded by video and uploaded to the teacher's website for others to view.

Stronger, more secure online passwords are a good idea for everyone. But how can we help kids create better passwords and actually remember them? Use the tips in this lesson to help kids make passwords that are both secure and memorable.

Students will be able to:

• Define the term "password" and describe a password's purpose.

• Understand why a strong password is important.

• Practice creating a memorable and strong password.

Users will need to create a free account to access this resource. 

These How-To Cards introduce multiple pathways and features to help children get started using the PBS KIDS ScratchJr app for block programming. Print, cut, glue, and make them available for children to reference as they work with the app.

PBS KIDS ScratchJr app is now available for free from the App Store on iPad and from the Google Play store on Android tablets.

This is a lesson plan from Google Education's Applied Digital Skills. During this lesson, students will learn artificial intelligence concepts using QuickDraw, AutoDraw, Google Translate, and Google Slides. As they complete this lesson, students will provide a basic explanation of how artificial intelligence works. Students will discuss some benefits and challenges of using artificial intelligence. They will identify a few well-known tools that use artificial intelligence and provide examples of how artificial intelligence is used around the world on a typical day. 

This lesson covers how to use media such as images, video, or music created by others on a website. In addition, students will respect the rights of the creator of that media by reviewing content permissions. After first studying Creative Commons licensing, the class learns how to add images to web pages, and how to give proper attribution when doing so.

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