Intro to CS
A 14 week Introduction to Computer Science course.
This course is targeted to middle school grades 6-8 (ages 11-14 years). It is also written for teachers who may not have a Computer Science background, or who may be teaching an “Intro to Computer Science” course for the first time.
This course takes approximately 14 weeks to complete, spending about 1 week on each of the first 11 lessons, and 3 weeks for students to complete the final project at the end. Of course, teachers should feel free to customize the curriculum to meet individual school or district resources and timeframe.
Download it
The entire course is also available as a download or as a book. Choose any of these formats:
Educators: For educators, there’s an separate edition of this course containing downloadable materials for teaching the course in a classroom setting:
Lesson structure
Each of the 12 lessons is structured in this format:
- Topic Introduction
- Unplugged Activity (30 min) - An offline game or activity that demonstrates the concept/topic
- micro:bit Activity (45-60 min) - An activity that everyone makes on their micro:bit that teaches the skills learned in this lesson.
- Project (60-120 min) - A prompt for an original project that each student will create to demonstrate their understanding of the skills and concepts covered in this lesson.
- Project Mods - Examples of additional things students can do to extend the project.
- Assessment - A project rubric and guidance for grading the project.
- Standards - A list of CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards and/or concepts covered by this lesson.
Course contents
Lessons
- Making
- Algorithms
- Variables
- Conditionals
- Iteration
- Review/Mini-Project
- Coordinate grid system
- Booleans
- Bits, bytes, and binary
- Radio
- Arrays
- Independent final project
