Curriculum Design
Project Description: This AI instructional guide for middle school teachers consist of 5 lesson plans each taking up 5 hours (5 hours * 5 days) for a summer camp. The lesson plans include learning objectives, keywords, standards, and learning activities for each lesson. Specifically, the instructions are concentrated on plugged and unplugged hands-on activities designed for helping students grasp the concepts of AI.
Target Learners: Middle School Students (Grades 6–8)
Project Description: This math-infused embodied curriculum was designed to develop computational thinking and spatial reasoning skills for lower elementary students. Throughout the five lessons in the curriculum, students are expected to identify the meanings of the codes, predict the outcomes, and fix the codes when the intended outcome was not achieved. Within each lesson, students are to complete tasks, which gradually increase in subsequent lessons. Each lesson consists of two main learning activities: embodied learning and programming. Whereas students figure out spatial reasoning tasks by walking on a mat themselves for the embodied activities, they program Bee-Bots for the next activity, which includes coding, observing, and debugging.
Target Learners: Grades 1-2
MR_Lesson Plans.pdf
Project Description: This issue-centered problem-based learning (PBL) computer science (CS) curriculum teaches CS block-based coding in a shorter time frame than most other curricula and incorporates a PBL activity to utilize newly-acquired CS skills to address a socially relevant problem.
The first component of the curriculum consisted of a 10-hour Block-Based CS curriculum using Scratch. Utilizing frameworks from Brennan and Resnick, and the Indiana CS K-8 standards, this curriculum focuses on Computational Thinking (CT) concepts (e.g., sequences, loops, events, conditions) and CT practices (e.g., decomposition, development).
The second component of the curriculum focuses on a student-centered PBL activity that would allow students to apply their CS skills to a relevant problem. Our teacher partners chose to focus the PBL activity on the driving question: How can we create a culture of kindness in our school? The activity introduced concepts of kindness and heavily incorporates elements of the social-emotional curriculum. Instructional resources to provide scaffolding to students on how to conduct research on this topic are included.
Target Audience: Grades 4-6