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Most of us use a lot of digital media in our daily lives -- even when we don't realize it! Having a balance between online and offline time is important, but a healthy media balance might look different for everyone. Help students create a personalized plan for healthy media use.

Students will be able to:

• make an inventory of their media choices and how those choices make them feel.

• brainstorm personal strategies for balancing media use.

• create personal guidelines for promoting healthy media balance.

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

Students are introduced to computer programming concepts as they solve basic coding puzzles, and enhance STEM learning outcomes as they play a fun coding adventure game. Learn skills such as patterning, sequencing, loops, conditionals, critical thinking, and problem-solving, while leading a personalized troll through the adventure! This interactive game can be used during a lesson on constructing elements of a simple computer program in collaboration with others. A teacher's guide and answer key are available. Est. time: 30 min. More free coding activities @ Tynker.

With mobile phone alerts, social media updates, and 24/7 news cycles, it's hard to escape the daily flood of breaking news. But do kids really understand what they're seeing when stories first break? Help students analyze breaking news with a critical eye for false or incomplete information, and discuss the downsides of our "always-on" news media culture.

• Define breaking news, and understand why individuals and news outlets want to be first to report a story.
• Analyze breaking news alerts to identify clues of false or incomplete information.
• Reflect on the consequences of reacting right away to breaking news alerts.

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

Learn about different types of hackers with this video from the NOVA Cybersecurity Lab. Hacking is solving problems in creative or unexpected ways. Hacks have been used for everything from Galileo’s telescope to Apollo 13. Similarly, there are many reasons that people hack computers. Some are just curious about how systems work, others hack to find and fix security flaws before they are exploited by criminals. Some hackers have bad intentions fueled by greed, attention, or rebellion. There are some hackers who have good intentions, but use questionable methods of getting information. “Hacking” isn’t good or bad – it depends on how and why people hack. This video comes with discussion questions. This video can be played during a lesson discussing the ethical ramifications of malicious hacking and its impact on society.

By combining the Draw Loop and the Counter Pattern, the class writes programs that move sprites across the screen, as well as animate other sprite properties.

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

In this activity, pupils will follow an algorithm to draw pictures constructed from 2D shapes. The algorithms they follow will include errors and pupils will use logical reasoning to detect and correct these.

PUPIL OBJECTIVES:
I can use logical reasoning to detect and correct errors in an algorithm.

TEACHING ASSESSMENT OPPORTUNITIES:
Informal, teacher assessment of progress during the main task, class discussions and plenary. Focus on how pupils use logical reasoning to identify errors in an algorithm and fix errors in the algorithm.
Formal, summative assessment of debugging sheets if required.

The lesson begins on page 43 of the document accessed via the resource link.

Students will:

- identify different types of media as intellectual property: writings, music, videos, computer games, etc.

-understand that intellectual property laws protect online and offline material.

-understand that it is stealing from real people if one copies copyright-protected material or downloads material from the internet without permission.

-understand it is against the law to download copyright-protected videos, music, etc. from the internet without permission.

- investigate famous cases of trade secret theft.

- investigate peer-to-peer networks.

Robotic devices are everywhere: in factories, law enforcement, caretaking. Today they are smarter than ever, but they only excel when the task is clearly defined. This video can be played during a lesson on identifying emerging technologies in computing.

In small groups, the class uses the design process to come up with ideas for smart clothing. From brainstorming to identifying users, to finally proposing a design, this is the first of several opportunities in this unit to practicing designing a solution for the needs of others.

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

The world is a noisy place, and errors can occur whenever information is stored or transmitted. Error detection techniques add extra parity bits to data to determine when errors have occurred.

This activity is a magic trick which most audiences find intriguing. In the trick the demonstrator is “magically” able to figure which one out of dozens of cards has been turned over, using the same methods that computers use to figure out if an error has occurred in data storage.

This learning activity will examine social media’s influence on America’s Civil Rights movement and its role in democratizing the media. In this video from Eyes on the Prize: Then and Now, activists, including DeRay McKesson, use social media to support the work of social change protesters. Because communications are unmediated and occur in real-time, McKesson says, social media can help build community. Tamika Mallory calls social media a powerful asset, enabling people who have never met before to share information and support one another’s efforts. Bree Newsome points out that without social media, people might not even have heard of important cases—including those of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Sandra Bland. This video comes with a facilitator guide and student handout that helps guide the discussion of this activity.

Students will explore a wide variety of new and innovative computing platforms while expanding their understanding of what a computer can be.

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

If you've ever written a text-based program or typed a formula in a spreadsheet, chances are that at some stage the system has told you there's an error and won't even attempt to follow your instructions.

These "syntax errors" are annoying messages that programmers become excruciatingly familiar with... it means that they didn't follow the rules somehow, even if it's just a tiny mistake. 

When you try to compile or run the program, the computer will tell you that there's an error. If it's really helpful, it might even suggest where the error is, but it won't run the program until you fix it.

This might seem annoying, but in fact, by enforcing precision and attention to detail it helps pinpoint mistakes before they become bugs in the program that go undetected until someone using it complains that it's not working correctly.

Update your students on the social media trend of raising money for ALS research with this video and educational materials.

This lesson will prepare students mentally for the coding exercises that they will encounter over the length of this course. In small teams, students will use physical activity to program their classmates to step carefully from place to place until a goal is achieved.

By using physical movement to program their classmates, students will run into issues and emotions similar to what they will feel when they begin coding on a computer. Encountering those stresses in a playful and open environment will help to alleviate intensity and allow students to practice necessary skills before they run into problems on their own.

Students will be able to:
- Define a list of steps (algorithm) to get a friend from their starting position to their goal.
- Translate a list of steps into a series of physical actions.
- Identify and fix errors in the execution of an algorithm.

Note: You must create a free account to access this and use this resource. 

This is a free resource providing keyboarding, digital literacy,  and coding instruction for students.  The lessons are automated, or teachers can choose to assign lessons. Teachers can view student progress and can see current words-per-minute counts for students.   The resource includes accessible technology and multilingual curriculum.

As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been a growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly complicated. Vocabularies are diverse, sentence structures can often dictate the meaning of certain words, and computers also have to deal with accents, mispronunciations, and many common linguistic faux pas.

By the time students reach this lesson, they should already have plenty of practice using repeat loops, so now it's time to mix things up.

While loops are loops that continue to repeat commands while a condition is met. While loops are used when the programmer doesn't know the exact number of times commands need to be repeated but does know what condition needs to be true in order for the loop to continue repeating. For example, students will be working to fill holes and dig dirt in Farmer. They will not know the size of the holes or the height of the mountains of dirt, but the students will know they need to keep filling the holes and digging the dirt as long as the ground is not flat.

As your students continue to deepen their knowledge of loops, they will come across problems where a command needs to be repeated, but it is unknown how many times it needs to be repeated. This is where while loops come in. In today's lesson, students will develop a beginner's understanding of condition-based loops and also expand their knowledge of loops in general.

Students will be able to:
- distinguish between loops that repeat a fixed number of times and loops that repeat as long as a condition is true.
- use a while loop to create programs that can solve problems with unknown values.

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

Communication is an art. It involves listening and speaking as well as reading and writing clearly and creatively. Technology provides creative opportunities for expressing yourself digitally.

These Quests provide opportunities to learn about different software applications for creating digital objects or artifacts to communicate your ideas in new and creative ways.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

When you have completed this activity you will:​

1. know how to use different media tools to communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively [Creative Communicator]

2. be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of different media tools [Creative Communicator]

3. know how to select an appropriate technology tool to meet different types of communication [Creative Communicator, Knowledge Constructor]

4. understand how to use and remix several different technology tools responsibly to communicate information [Empowered Learner, Creative Communicator]

5. be able to use a design process to plan and create digital artifacts [Innovative Designer]

Carrie Anne is going to start our overview of the fundamental building blocks of programming languages. We’ll start by creating small programs for our very own video game to show how statements and functions work. We aren’t going to code in a specific language, but we’ll show you how conditional statements like IF and ELSE statements, WHILE loops, and FOR loops control the flow of programs in nearly all languages, and then we’ll finish by packaging up these instructions into functions that can be called by our game to perform more and more complex actions.

In this lesson, students practice using and creating functions with parameters. Students learn that writing functions with parameters can generalize solutions to problems even further. Especially in situations where you feel like you are about to duplicate some code with only a few changes to some numbers, that is a good time to write a function that accepts parameters. In the second half of the lesson, students make a series of modifications to a program that creates an “Under the Sea” scene by adding parameters to functions to more easily add variation to the scene. Lastly, students are introduced to App Lab’s random number functions to supply random values to function calls so the scene looks a little different every time the program runs.

Students will be able to:
- write functions with parameters to generalize a solution instead of duplicating code.
- identify appropriate situations for creating a function with parameters.
- use random numbers as inputs to function calls for the purpose of testing.
- add parameters to a function in an existing piece of code to generalize its behavior.

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

Students will review a court case and case study to determine what is protected and what may not be. 

Elonis v. the United States provides the foundation for a debate on what forms of expression on social media are and are not protected by the First Amendment — and the blurry line in-between.

To access this free resource, you will need a free account. 

We’re going to begin with computer networks, and how they grew from small groups of connected computers on LAN networks to eventually larger worldwide networks like the ARPANET and even the Internet we know today.

In this lesson, students gain more practice using while loops as they develop a simulation that repeatedly flips coins until certain conditions are met. The lesson begins with an unplugged activity in which students flip a coin until they get five heads in total, and then again until they get three heads in a row. They will then compete to predict the highest outcome in the class for each statistic. This activity motivates the programming component of the lesson in which students develop a program that allows them to simulate this experiment for higher numbers of heads and longer streaks.

Students will be able to:
- use a while loop in a program to repeatedly call a block of code.
- use variables, iteration, and conditional logic within a loop to record the results of a repeated process.
- identify instances where a simulation might be useful to learn more about real-world phenomena.
- develop a simulation of a simple real-world phenomenon.

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

The power of the internet allows students to experience and visit places they might not be able to see in person. But, just like traveling in the real world, it's important to be safe when traveling online. On this virtual field trip, kids can practice staying safe on online adventures.

• discover that the internet can be used to visit faraway places and learn new things.
• compare how staying safe online is similar to staying safe in the real world.
• explain rules for traveling safely on the internet.

Users will need a free account to access this resource.

In this lesson, students (K-3) will be introduced to the PBS KIDS ScratchJr app by creating interactive characters that respond to tap. Through this process, they will learn about movement blocks, looks blocks, the ‘start on tap’ trigger, and character selection.

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

This lesson covers the purposes that a website might serve, both for the users and the creators. The class explores a handful of the most-used websites in the United States and discusses how each of those sites is useful for users and how it might also serve its creators.

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

This video explains ten commandments of computer ethics. Students will learn the thou shalt NOTS of computer practices. The wording is more appropriate for high school students, but can easily be used with middle school students, especially with class discussion.