This lesson has students recognize that computer science can help people in real life. First, students empathize with several fictional smartphone users in order to help them find the “right app” that addresses their needs. Then, students exercise empathy and creativity to sketch their own smartphone app that addresses the needs of one additional user.

Events are a great way to add variety to a pre-written algorithm. Sometimes you want your program to be able to respond to the user exactly when the user wants it to. That is what events are for.

In collaboration with **Common Sense Education**, this lesson helps students learn about the similarities of staying safe in the real world and when visiting websites. Students will also learn that the information they put online leaves a digital footprint or “trail.” This trail can be big or small, helpful or hurtful, depending on how they manage it.

This lesson will work to 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.

As we start to write longer and more interesting programs, our code often contains a lot of repetition. In this lesson, students will learn about how loops can be used to more easily communicate instructions that have a lot of repetition by looking at the repeated patterns of movement in a dance.

Students will soon learn that events are a great way to add flexibility to a pre-written algorithm. Sometimes you want your program to be able to respond to the user exactly when the user wants it to. Events can make your program more interesting and interactive.

Data can be used to help students understand their world and answer interesting questions. In this lesson, students will collect data from a Play Lab project and visualize it using different kinds of graphs.

This lesson helps children to recognize that it is essential to tell a trusted adult if something online makes them feel angry, sad, or scared.

Students learn that other people can sometimes act like bullies when they are online. They will explore what cyberbullying means and what they can do when they encounter it. After reading a scenario about mean online behavior, students discuss what cyberbullying is, how it can make people feel, and how to respond. Finally, they use their knowledge to create a simple tip sheet on cyberbullying in their journal.

Students explore why people use passwords, learn the benefits of using passwords, and discover strategies for creating and keeping strong, secure passwords.

Students learn password tips, test their existing passwords with an interactive game, and create new passwords using guidelines for powerful passwords.

Using a set of symbols in place of code, students will design algorithms to instruct a "robot" to stack cups in different patterns. Students will take turns participating as the robot, responding only to the algorithm defined by their peers. This segment teaches students the connection between symbols and actions, the difference between an algorithm and a program, and the valuable skill of debugging.

Binary is extremely important in the world of computers. The majority of computers today store all sorts of information in binary form. This lesson helps demonstrate how it is possible to take something from real life and translate it into a series of ons and offs.

Building on the initial "My Robotic Friends" activity, students tackle larger and more complicated designs. In order to program their "robots" to complete these bigger designs, students will need to identify repeated patterns in their instructions that could be replaced with a loop.

This lesson demonstrates how conditionals can be used to tailor a program to specific information. We don’t always have all of the information we need when writing a program. Sometimes you will want to do something different in one situation than in another, even if you don't know what situation will be true when your code runs. That is where conditionals come in. Conditionals allow a computer to make a decision, based on the information that is true any time your code is run.

Though many people think of binary as strictly zeros and ones, students will be introduced to the idea that information can be represented in a variety of binary options. This lesson takes that concept one step further as it illustrates how a computer can store even more complex information (such as images and colors) in binary, as well.

In collaboration with Common Sense Education, this lesson helps students learn to think critically about the user information that some websites request or require. Students learn the difference between private information and personal information, distinguishing what is safe and unsafe to share online.

Students will also explore what it means to be responsible and respectful to their offline and online communities as a step toward learning how to be good digital citizens.

By "programming" one another to draw pictures, students get an opportunity to experience some of the core concepts of programming in a fun and accessible way. The class will start by having students use symbols to instruct each other to color squares on graph paper in an effort to reproduce an existing picture. If there’s time, the lesson can conclude with images that the students create themselves.

This activity will begin with a short lesson on debugging and persistence, then will quickly move to a race against the clock as students break into teams and work together to write a program one instruction at a time.

In this lesson, students will learn about accessibility and the value of empathy through brainstorming and designing accessible solutions for hypothetical apps.

One of the most magnificent structures in the computer science world is the function. Functions (sometimes called procedures) are mini programs that you can use over and over inside of your bigger program. This lesson will help students intuitively understand why combining chunks of code into functions can be such a helpful practice.

In this lesson, students will play a game intended to get them thinking about the way commands need to be given to produce the right result. This will help them more easily carry over to Sprite Lab in the upcoming lessons.