This lesson sequence offers students and teachers a way to explore their individual identities and sense of belonging through analyzing children’s literature and coding with Scratch. Through read-aloud activities and self-differentiated Scratch projects, students learn about the value of inclusion and explore and express ideas about their personal and social identities. Students will describe environments supportive of diversity, and reflect on their own identity as they create expressive projects about their sense of belonging. This sequence is made up of four lessons, though your students may need additional class time to work on their projects.This lesson sequence is part of CodeVA's committment to the U.S. Department of Education "YOU Belong in STEM" initiative.

The internet can be both an exciting and terrifying place, and knowledge of how to navigate it is crucial for students. In this lesson, students will take on the role of an investigative detective who is gathering intel on a specific kind of cybercrime. These cybercrimes are all real events that occurred in history and students analysis of them will help them understand the types of crimes that take place in the digital world and understand how and why these types of crimes take place.

Welcome back to the Cyber Crimes Unit. Now that students have been taught an overview of Cybersecurity threats, they are now going to focus in on a very specific type of threat as they wrap up this topic. Denial of Service Attacks are an amalgamation of a lot of different concepts discussed before (phishing, malware, etc), but elevate these concepts to company destroying techniques. Unlike some sophisticated techniques, this can be a rEnglishtively home grown cyberattack, so the more students understand what it is, how it attacks, and how to protect themselves, the more informed they will be about this very common technique in cybersecurity.

The process of how a bill becomes law is a fascinating process that is much more than just a Representative or Senator introducing a bill and having it move through the process to its eventual demise or addition to another bill or to the bill ending up on the President’s desk itself.  An even more interesting question is: “What is the subject matter of MANY of these bills- researched, drafted, and introduced?  This lesson will tackle that question and many others! 

The student will identify and interpret data and organize it in order  to make a prediction, with or without a computing device.

Students will research different perspectives and the effect the Civil War had on their lives. They will create a video to share from the perspective they have chosen. The students will create scripts and give credit to sources while being creative in their video. At least one image from a Primary Source (a document or object that was created by an individual or group as part of their daily lives) will be used in the video.

In this lesson, students will create a social media post about the life cycle of an organism. This organism can be decided upon by the teacher or the teacher could use the list of suggestions provided in the lesson. The social media post should show the student’s knowledge of the life cycle and the phases of life that it goes through.

This is a whole group lesson. The students will come to the carpet and learn about the word communication. Afterwards, the students will play the Telephone Game. After playing the game a few times, the students will then learn about communication methods from long ago and today. They will also determine the difference between communication methods that are delivered electronically and those that aren’t. Students will name a way they electronically communicate with others at the end.

This resource was created to help students grasp a better understanding of what and how an algorithm works. 

The teacher will facilitate a whole-class discussion on two ways people communicate on the internet (email and social media).

Make life cycles and data recording “egg”-citing! Incubate eggs in your classroom. As you do, monitor and record data. 

In this lesson, students will learn how to sort coins based on physical attributes that they possess. The students will get time to practice sorting with both one attribute and then with two attributes.

This lesson is intended to be a project-based learning opportunity that may take place “behind the scenes” of the daily classroom or during small chunks of time over several weeks. There is flexibility in the implementation based on student needs and scheduling.

Students will learn about cybersecurity and the importance of passwords to create a poster and commercial to show their NetSmartz, over a two-day lesson.

During this lesson, students will create algorithms using repeating pattern loops for their classmates to follow. Instead of using shape or number patterns, students will create algorithms for their classmates to follow by completing physical movement (clapping, spinning in a circle, jumping jacks, etc.).

After being introduced to the iterative design process, students will produce a product that describes the life of Virginia’s native peoples before the arrival of the Jamestown settlers.

Students become authors as they use technology to create an ebook to share with their classmates. Students chose the life cycle of a flowering plant, frog, or butterfly. They review with hands-on resources and peer collaboration. They then use their ipad with the app “Book Creator” to create a book using real life pictures!

Slime is a fun and amazing invention. While many adults do not enjoy the mess that comes along with slime, students of all ages have come to enjoy this unique creation. So what phases of matter would we classify slime? It has properties of a solid, while also having properties of a liquid. The goal of this activity is for students to make observable changes to a provided slime recipe to create a slime that acts more like a solid than a liquid. The student will identify that the slime recipe is the basic algorithm, or steps taken to get a particular result. The student will modify the recipe by measuring and adding more “magic water.” Looping, or repeating the desired actions until the desired outcome is achieved. The student will record their observations.

This is a Google Slides that is to be used with the book Everything You Need to Ace Computer Science and Coding in One Big Fat Notebook, Unit 5, Chapter 16.