This lesson is designed to engage students in a meaningful and fun coding experience, while investigating sanitation practices, food, and kitchen safety. Students will create an animated story using block-based coding in Scratch. This overarching lesson idea (research – storyboard – code) can be applied to any subject.

Students will program a Sphero robot to travel around the exterior of a convex polygon. Students will then use the information in their code to determine the sum of the interior angles in a convex polygon.

Students will program a Sphero robot to travel around the exterior of a convex polygon. Students will then use the information in their code to determine the sum of the interior angles in a convex polygon.

This resource will show how to teach your students to make their own "formula calculator" using Java programming, and it has handouts for your students or your own use. It is ideal for Grade 7 and Grade 8 Math.The video in this resource walks you through the steps to teach your students to program their "formula calculator" using Java programming after they have been taught about geometric formulas. They can then use their calculator to help them solve their math problems. It will reinforce critical thinking skills and create a deeper understanding of how the formulas work.Students can use any Java IDE or even an online IDE. The lesson can be customized based on your familiarity with Java and your students' computer skills.The handouts show how to use arithmetic operators in Java as well as some Math class methods that will be helpful. The attached program can be used as a starting point for their programs. 

Students will code a robotic device to locate elements on the Periodic Table given a specific description of an element.

The goal of this activity is to solidify students' understanding of functions: Input/Independent Variable/Domain → Output/Dependent Variable/Range in math and relate that to functions in CS.

In this lesson, students will experience the force of friction as they use block-based coding to program a Sphero Bot through a maze made up of materials with varying amounts of friction.

Games have been an integral part of human culture throughout history. They not only entertain, but also inform and change us. Today video games designers bring together art & code to immerse their players in a story. There are video games being created to solve real-world problems and video game players solving scientific mysteries.

This lesson is part of the Virginia K-12 Computer Science Pipeline which is partly funded through a GO Virginia grant in partnership with Chesapeake Public Schools, Loudoun County Public Schools, and the Loudoun Education Foundation.  In this lesson, students will create examples of gravitational potential and kinetic energy transformations using Scratch.  

Students will investigate the Dakota Access Pipeline and the timeline of events surrounding it. They will collaborate to research the impact this new technology has had, and continues to have, on Native People in that area, as well as create a decision making model to compare and contrast the supporting and opposing perspectives.

This lesson takes students through the examination of the poem Remember and its use of figurative language to set the stage for considering how the physical world around us has changed in the past 50 years. Students research a specific local plant, animal, or element of weather and how it has changed over time, and then use Twine to represent their research in a digital story. This lesson culminates with the discussion of whether or not we are doing a good job of listening to Virginia’s natural elements over the past 50 years. This lesson was created through a partnership between CodeVA and the Virginia Tribal Education Consortium (VTEC). 

In this lesson students will be able to identify that computers, like the solar system, complete predictable actions based on a set of variables. Students will learn about the solar system via Scratch.  They will explore block coding and computational thinking practices as they utilize Scratch as a tool for creativity, expression and learning about the Solar System. 

This performance task is a computer science (CS) integration project where your students will take you on a virtual field trip. It can be to a museum, a historical site, a modern destination, a book, a planet or really anywhere. Along the way, they will incorporate CS concepts into their projects including sequences, conditionals, and events to add interactivity. This is a great project for students to share their research and learning from a wide variety of subject areas like social studies, language arts, world languages, history, etc. This unit includes 5th grade standards for the Virginia CS Standards of Learning, but it can easily be adapted for younger and older students. The latest resources for this project can be found at https://sites.google.com/virginia.edu/virtualfieldtrip/resources.