SFUSD's creative computing curriculum introduces computer science as a creative, collaborative, and engaging discipline to children in kindergarten through second grade. Across 3 units and 15-20 lessons, students will learn about algorithms and programming, computing systems, the Internet, and impacts of computing, while developing strong practices and dispositions. Lessons are designed to be implemented in 45 to 60-minute periods approximately once per week.
ScratchJr is a developmentally appropriate programming language designed specifically for children aged five through seven by teams at Tufts University and MIT. Using the ScratchJr app, children can create their own interactive collages, animated stories, games, and other programs. In this unit, which can be further divided into two modules, students will learn a series of concepts and skills that are applied in two primary creative projects -- an interactive collage and an animated story. Through these lessons, students will learn how to express their own ideas in a way that a computer can understand. These lessons were designed to support students working individually and in pairs, with 1-2 tablets per pair.
In this unit, students apply the computational skills they practiced in Unit 1 on actual computers - Bee-Bot robots! They playfully express themselves and reinforce language arts standards as they learn to program increasingly complex sequences of simple commands. Students gain fluency with planning, testing, and debugging programs as they work with familiar characters in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, More-igami, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales. The unit crescendos to a peak when students program Bee-Bots to retell a narrative they wrote in Writing Workshop! The optimal group size is 4 students or fewer per Bee-Bot.
In the first unit, students are introduced to computer science through playful, unplugged activities. The goal is for students to combine their creativity with content, to make their learning memorable and personally meaningful. Students persist joyfully as they engage in design, hardware, and big computational thinking topics: sequencing, pattern recognition, decomposition, and algorithms.
SFUSD's creative computing curriculum introduces computer science as a creative, collaborative, and engaging discipline to children in kindergarten through second grade. Across 3 units and 15-20 lessons, students will learn about algorithms and programming, computing systems, the Internet, and impacts of computing, while developing strong practices and dispositions. Lessons are designed to be implemented in 30 to 40-minute periods approximately once per week.
