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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.

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

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]

Today, Carrie Anne is going to take a look at how those transistors we talked about during the last episode can be used to perform complex actions. With just two states, on and off, the flow of electricity can be used to perform a number of logical operations, which are guided by a branch of mathematics called Boolean Algebra. We’re going to focus on three fundamental operations - NOT, AND, and OR - and show how they were created in a series of really useful circuits. These simple electrical circuits lay the groundwork for our much more complex machines.

In this lesson, students will begin to explore the way digital images are encoded in binary.

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

Computer programs often need to process a sequence of symbols such as letters or words in a document, or even the text of another computer program. Computer scientists often use a finite-state automaton to do this. A finite-state automaton (FSA) follows a set of instructions to see if the computer will recognize the word or string of symbols. We will be working with something equivalent to a FSA—treasure maps!

The goal of the students is to find Treasure Island. Friendly pirate ships sail along a fixed set of routes between the islands in this part of the world, offering rides to travelers. Each island has two departing ships, A and B, which you can choose to travel on. You need to find the best route to Treasure Island. At each island you arrive at you may ask for either ship A or B (not both). The person at the island will tell you where your ship will take you to next, but the pirates don’t have a map of all the islands available. Use your map to keep track of where you are going and which ship you have traveled on.