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According to Murphy’s Law – Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way. Anybody who has used technology knows this well. For this activity, students will prove Murphy wrong. Students will complete four Quests to learn how to troubleshoot common computer problems. Students must be ready to solve problems.

I CAN STATEMENTS

• troubleshoot computer problems
• fix problems on my computer
• create flowcharts to show how I solved the problem
• run anti-virus software
• understand what malware is and have some techniques to avoid it
• research solutions to computer problems

This video will discuss some psychological considerations in building computers, like how to make them easier for humans to use, the uncanny valley problem when humanoid robots get more and more humanlike, and strategies to make our devices work better with us by incorporating our emotions and even altering our gaze.

The next four lessons provide an opportunity for students to put their coding skills to use in a capstone project. This project will help individuals gain experience with coding and produce an exemplar to share with peers and loved ones. Intended to be a multi-lesson or multi-week experience, students will spend time exploring brainstorming, learning about the design process, building, and presenting their final work.

In the explore stage, students will play with pre-built examples of projects in both Artist and Sprite Lab for inspiration. Next, students will learn about the design process and how to implement it in their own projects. They will then be given the space to create their own project in Artist, Sprite Lab, or another interface that they have become familiar with (this is likely the longest stage of the project). Finally, students will be able to present finished work to their peers.

This lesson will inspire students with realistic and entertaining ideas for their culminating projects.

Students will be able to:
- learn to plan in advance for an ongoing assignment.
- explain how system limitations can affect project design.
- describe how compromise can help keep a project on track and inspire creativity.

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

Buying and selling on the Internet have changed the way we live. We can now perform a web search to locate, compare, and buy goods and services.

You are going to investigate e-commerce as a consumer and learn some tips on how to shop online, avoid Internet fraud, and benefit from reviews and ratings.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

When you have completed this activity you will:

1. know how to research and compare products [Computational Thinker]

2. know how to protect yourself as an online consumer [Digital Citizen]

3. be able to protect yourself from deceptive advertising, scams, and rip-offs [Digital Citizen]

This video will talk about how we organize the data we use on our devices. You might remember last episode, Intro to Algorithms: Crash Course Computer Science #13,  we walked through some sorting algorithms, but skipped over how the information actually got there in the first place! And it is this ability to store and access information in a structured and meaningful way that is crucial to programming. From strings, pointers, and nodes, to heaps, trees, and stacks, get ready for an ARRAY of new terminology and concepts.

Students use the Google Trends tool in order to visualize historical search data. They will need to identify interesting trends or patterns in their findings and will attempt to explain those trends, based on their own experience or through further research online. Afterward, students will present their findings to ensure they are correctly identifying patterns in a visualization and are providing plausible explanations of those patterns.

Students will be able to:
- use Google Trends to identify and explore connections and patterns within a data visualization.
- accurately describe what a data visualization of a trend is showing.
- provide plausible explanations of trends and patterns observed within a data visualization.

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

Students will define confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and examine accuracy, perspective, credibility, and relevance in sources.  Through articles and an opportunity to research one side of a debate, students will consider how confirmation bias and motivated reasoning shape the way we respond to evidence presented in news and opinion pieces.

You will need a free account to access this resource.

The World Wide Web is built on the foundation of simply linking pages to other pages with hyperlinks, but it is this massive interconnectedness that makes it so powerful. But before the web could become a thing, Tim Berners-Lee would need to invent the web browser at CERN, and search engines would need to be created to navigate these massive directories of information.

This is a pretty fun lesson that has two main parts. First students warm up by reflecting on the reasons data visualizations are used to communicate about data. This leads to the main activity in which students look at some collections of (mostly bad) data visualizations, rate them, explain why a good one is effective, and also suggest a fix for a bad one.

In the second part of the class, students compare their experiences and create a class list of common faults and best practices for creating data visualizations. Finally, students review and read the first few pages of "Data Visualization 101: How to design charts and graphs" to see some basic principles of good data visualizations and see how they compare with the list the class came up with.

Students will be able to:
- identify an effective data visualization and give justification.
- collaborate to investigate and evaluate a data visualization.
- suggest an appropriate visualization for some data.
- evaluate a data visualization for the effectiveness of communication.
- identify a poor data visualization and give justification.

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

Does what you do online always stay online? Students learn that the information they share online leaves a digital footprint or "trail." Depending on how they manage it, this trail can be big or small, and harmful or helpful. Students compare different trails and think critically about what kinds of information they want to leave behind.

Students will be able to:

• Learn that the information they share online leaves a digital footprint or "trail"

• Explore what information is OK to be shared online

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

Word up! In this activity, children will explore decision-making as they use PBS KIDS ScratchJr to help WordGirl make a tough choice between saving the day and going to her friend’s birthday party.

Children will learn how to use the PBS KIDS ScratchJr programming blocks to make animated stories and interactive projects. They will explore coding and computational thinking practices as they utilize technology as a tool for creativity, expression, and learning with the PBS KIDS ScratchJr app.

This lesson dives deeper into the concept of processing that was introduced as part of the definition of a computer. Pairs work together to put a deck of cards in order, a form of processing information. In the end, the class discusses what processing means within the context of solving information problems.

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

What is Cryptography? A story which takes us from Caesar to Claude Shannon. Created by Brit Cruise.

On the left side of the linked webpage, there are additional resources related to cryptology, including Caesar cipher, polyalphabetic cipher, and the Enigma machine.

Kids find and read the news in lots of different ways. But studies show they're not very good at interpreting what they see. How can we help them get better? Teaching your students about the structure of online news articles is an important place to start.

• understand the purposes of different parts of an online news page.
• identify the parts and structure of an online news article.
• learn about things to watch out for when reading online news pages, such as sponsored content and advertisements.

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

Hear the pros and cons of online advertising from the much-loved character Ruff Ruffman, in this animated video from RUFF RUFFMAN: HUMBLE MEDIA GENIUS. With his uniquely comical style, Ruff helps students acquire some key twenty-first-century skills. This resource is part of the RUFF RUFFMAN: HUMBLE MEDIA GENIUS Collection. This video can be played to introduce a lesson on identifying the different forms of web advertising and why websites, digital resources, and artifacts may include advertisements and collecting personal information.

Steve Trash teaches kids about science with fun and magic. The show is filmed in Alabama.

What are pollinators? What do they do? And how are they like messy babies? Then, see how every time you do something online you’re creating a digital footprint that can be tracked back to you. Steve Trash explains both with fun and magic.

In order to create more interesting and detailed images, the class is introduced to the sprite object. Every sprite can be assigned an image to show, and sprites also keep track of multiple values about themselves, which will prove useful when making animations. At the end of the lesson, everyone creates a scene using sprites.

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

Welcome to Dance Mat Typing, a fun way to learn touch typing.

There are four levels to play, each divided into three stages.

You start by learning the home row keys. Each stage builds on previous lessons, introducing new letters as you progress. You’ll soon be touch typing like an expert! At the end of each level, you can test your typing speed and get a fun reward.

Our digital footprints can have a powerful impact on our future. This can be a scary thought, given that what's in our digital footprint isn't always in our control. Teach students that digital footprints are an opportunity to showcase their best selves and craft a footprint that leads to future success.

• Learn that they have a public presence online called a digital footprint.
• Recognize that any information they post online can help or hurt their future opportunities (college admission, employment, etc.).
• Create a vignette that shows how a positive digital footprint can help someone take advantage of an opportunity.

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

Discover the 19 worst passwords and learn how to keep your password safe from computer hackers in this article from NOVA scienceNOW.  Students can read this article during a lesson on cybersecurity. 

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.

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

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.

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

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.