To review and pre-teach content material, this fun and engaging 100th Day of School activity is a great way to get students interested in the major historical events of the last 100 years. To begin the activity, the teacher will either write on the whiteboard or announce that today the class is going to assume the role of Historical Investigators, revealing the most exciting events in history over the last 100 years. The teacher will then group the students into groups of 2-4 based on the class size. The teacher will pass out the investigation sheet, and direct students to open the Google Slide presentation. The teacher will model how to select and research a given historical event using credible sources. 

The annual Elie Wiesel Writing and Visuals Arts Competition is open to students in grades 6 through 12 and serves to inspire middle and high school students and teachers to learn more about the Holocaust, racism, bigotry, and the dangers of prejudice. The questions posed each year guide students to explore the lessons of the Holocaust while examining contemporary issues such as bullying, peer pressure, unthinking obedience to authority, and indifference.

Get a Job! Students will use their persuasive messaging skills to research and promote various computer science fields in the unit.

Information Technology is a broad field to learn about. Within IT there are many careers. This lesson is designed to help engage the students in the IT field where they will be able to research and discover various jobs they are interested in. Students will discover the education requirments, possible benefits of different jobs, salary, hiring demad, and growth potential in the field.The activities include: brainstorming, compare and contrast, research, writing,  and using software either in Google or Microsoft.

Your task as an astronomer is to model the solar system using technology.  You and your crew are just one group that have been asked by NASA to chart the solar system in order to create a simulation model for future astronauts. After you have accomplished this, you will present your model to the Director of NASA. They have given you several requirements for the simulation. Your simulation should include a map of the solar system that shows the appropriate distance, location, size and relation to the sun amongst the eight planets. You and your team can use a variety of options to complete your simulation. These include Google Suite tools (such as Google Slides, Google Docs, Jamboard, or any equivalent tool such as Microsoft Office), Coding resources (Scratch.edu, tynker.edu) or 3D printing software (Tinkercad) to present. Your map should also include a short descriptive paragraph for each planet explaining its distance, location, size, and at least 3 facts about the planet. If creating a video, you will still want to include descriptions for the planets as well as the three facts.  Presentation to “NASA Directors” must answer the question: how does this simulation/model help future scientists?

This article provides an overview of current research about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as well as strategies to help students with ADHD with reading and writing.

This writer’s reference condenses and covers everything a beginning writing student needs to successfully compose college-level work, including the basics of composition, grammar, and research. It is broken down into easy-to-tackle sections, while not overloading students with more information than they need. Great for any beginning writing students or as reference for advanced students!

This activity is an indoor/outdoor activity that incorporates both literacy and scientific observation to make an ABC book based on Antler, Bear, Canoe by Betsy Bowen. Family participation is encouraged.

In this biography-based unit, second graders explore biographies of famous leaders and change agents. The unit has three main sections. In the first section students research and learn about people who have changed the world by inventing things. In this section students will explore the ways in which inventions can change the world and what it takes to turn an idea into action. In the second section students research and learn about people who have changed the world by standing up for what they believe in and fighting for what others think is impossible. In this section second graders explore the ways some leaders have persevered in the face of obstacles and stood up for themselves or ideas when many had stopped believing in them. In the third section students research and learn about people who have changed the world by making the world and environment a better place for everyone. In each of the sections, students read biographies that expose them to a wide variety of themes, content, and history. It is incredibly important that the necessary framing is done prior to reading a text so that students can deeply engage with the biographies and fully understand the challenges and successes of the different people being studied. Without framing or context, students may miss why each person's actions are inspirational. It is our hope that this unit will open students' eyes to the multitude of ways in which a person, regardless of race or gender, can influence and inspire change.

For readers, this unit is a combination of read-aloud and shared reading. At this point in the year second graders have been exposed to almost all of the high-frequency informational reading standards; therefore, this unit is a chance to review some standards and skills students need to practice. Two new standards that are a focus in this unit, however, are describing how reasons support particular points the author makes in a text and also comparing and contrasting the most important points presented by two texts on the same topic. Compare and contrast in this unit should go deeper than text features and structures. Although students can note differences in text features, the main focus should be on comparing and contrasting the different points and the reasons the authors use to support the points in two texts about the same person.

To kick off the final unit of this course, students will do some research into interesting innovations in computing. This lesson will expose students to wider variety of computing form factors (what a computer looks like) and fields that are impacted by computing. Later in this unit students will look back on the devices they encountered in this lesson as they develop their own physical computing devices.

The core idea of this lesson occurs in the unplugged activity that kicks off the lesson, in which students try to keep track of IP addresses that had been randomly assigned to each student in the class, while at the same time the teacher occasionally changes students' addresses. This leads to identifying the need for an authoritative system for name-to-address mappings, known as the Domain Name System or [v DNS].

Students then briefly experiment with a DNS protocol in the Internet Simulator. The activity is similar, in that students will have to grapple with IP addresses changing in real time and use the built in DNS protocol to resolve the issues.

The lesson ends with students doing some rapid research about DNS and some of its vulnerabilities, particularly what are known as Denial of Service Attacks.

This lesson is a capstone to the Internet unit. Students will research and prepare a flash talk about an issue facing society: either **[v Net Neutrality]** or **Internet Censorship**. Developing an informed opinion about these issues hinges on an understanding of how the Internet functions as a system. Students will prepare and deliver a flash talk that should combine forming an opinion about the issue and an exhibition of their knowledge of the internet.

This lesson is good *practice* for certain elements of the AP Explore Performance Task.1 The primary things practiced here are: doing a bit of research about impacts of computing (though here it’s specifically about the Internet), explaining some technical details related to ideas in computer science, and connecting these ideas to global and social impacts. Students will practice synthesizing information, and presenting their learning in a flash talk.

1**Note:** This is NOT the official AP® Performance Task that will be submitted as part of the Advanced Placement exam; it is a practice activity intended to prepare students for some portions of their individual performance at a later time.

This lesson sets the the stage for why we want to learn about how the Internet works. First students share what they currently know about how the Internet works through a KWL activity.

Then students watch a short video the introduces Vint Cerf and the Internet at high level. Students then skim a memo written to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) by Vint Cerf in 2002 entitled “The Internet is for Everyone,” which calls out a series of threats to the prospect that the Internet should be an open, easily and cheaply accessible resource for everyone on the planet.

Finally we foreshadow the practice PT at the end of the unit. Many of the questions and challenges raised by Vint Cerf still apply today, and students will be asked to research and present on one for the Practice PT.

In this lesson students are introduced to the standard units for measuring the sizes of digital files, from a single byte, all the way up to terabytes and beyond. Students begin the lesson by comparing the size of a plain text file containing “hello” to a Word document with the same contents. Students are introduced to the units kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte, and research the sizes of files they make use of every day, using the appropriate terminology. This lesson foreshadows an investigation of compression as a means for combatting the rapid growth of digital data.

Students learn the difference between lossy and lossless compression by experimenting with a simple lossy compression widget for compressing text. Students then research three real-world compressed file formats to fill in a research guide. Throughout the process they review the skills and strategies used to research computer science topics online, in particular to cope with situations when they don't have the background to fully understand everything they're reading (a common situation even for experienced CS students).

In this lesson students will conduct a small amount of research to explore a file format either currently in use or from history. Students will conduct research in order to complete a "one-pager" that summarizes their findings. They will also design a computational artifact (video, audio, graphic, etc.) that succinctly summarizes the advantages of their format over other similar ones.

This lesson is intended to be a quick, short version of a performance task in which students rapidly do some research and respond in writing. It might take 2 class days but should not take more. The goal is to develop skills that students will use when they complete the actual Explore PT later in the year.

Students learn about various types of cybercrimes and the cybersecurity measures that can help prevent them. Then students perform a Rapid Research project investigating a particular cybercrime event with a particular focus on the data that was lost or stolen and the concerns that arise as a result. The Rapid Research activity features vocabulary, concepts, and skills that should help prepare them for the AP Explore PT, and also serves as a capstone for the sequence of lessons on encryption and security.

This lesson asks students to consider carefully the assumptions they make when interpreting data and data visualizations. The class begins by examining how the Google Flu Trends project tried and failed to use search trends to predict flu outbreaks. They will then read a report on the Digital Divide which highlights how access to technology differs widely by personal characteristics like race and income. This report challenges a widespread assumption that data collected online is representative of the population at large. To practice identifying assumptions in data analysis, students are provided a series of scenarios in which data-driven decisions are made based on flawed assumptions. They will need to identify the assumptions being made (most notably those related to the digital divide) and explain why these assumptions lead to incorrect conclusions.

In this lesson students will conduct a small amount of research to explore a computing innovation that leverages the use of data. Students will research a topic of personal interest and respond to questions about about how that innovation produces, uses, or consumes data. The lesson is intended to give students practice with doing research of this nature and provides a small amount of scaffolding to help students figure out what to look for.

This lesson is intended to be a quick, short version of a performance task in which students rapidly do some research and respond in writing. It might take 2 class days but should not take more. The goal is to generate ideas for exploration later when students complete the actual Explore PT later in the year.

Allow students the opportunity to explore their career goals! This activity will allow them to develop their research skills and provide a hands-on experience to help stretch their perspective. Let your students guide themselves into discovering new career path options!