Computer Science Lesson Plans (10 results)
From cell phones to social media, computer science is a part of your daily life. Everything from traffic lights to medical devices requires both computer hardware and software these days. Creative problem solvers are using computer science to tackle social problems, improve agriculture, make great entertainment, and start exciting new companies. What could you create and innovate with a bit of tinkering and programming?
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Lesson Plan
Grade: 3rd-5th
1 review
Do your students have their own online accounts like email or social media? What about a login for the school computers? If so, they might have to pick passwords. Have you ever had trouble creating (and forgetting) good passwords? This fun lesson plan involves a guessing game that can teach your students how to make their passwords harder to guess. Learn how to keep your accounts safe!
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Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
7 reviews
Junkbots are easy-to-build robots that you can make using a simple circuit and some recyclable materials. In this lesson, your students will learn about engineering design as they compete to build the fastest robot. No previous robotics experience is required!
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-12th
7 reviews
This lesson plan will introduce your students to physical computing: the process of building circuits and programming a microcontroller (an Arduino UNO®) to interact with them. The lesson is broken into seven activities that will walk your students through the basics of setting up the Arduino and interacting with circuit parts like LEDs, buttons, and resistors. This introductory material will help prepare your students for more advanced Arduino projects.
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
4 reviews
We hear the word "digital" all the time—digital technology, digital device, digital TV, etc. But what does it actually mean? In this lesson plan, your students will learn how digital signals allow us to reliably transmit and store information.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 8th-12th
2 reviews
This eight-part lesson will guide you through building and programming Arduino-controlled autonomous cars with your students. Each part contains a detailed step-by-step video and a supplemental lesson plan PDF with learning objectives, assessment opportunities, and appendices with circuit diagrams and example code. You can present the material yourself or have students follow along with the videos and pause to work on their autonomous cars.
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 8th-12th
1 review
In this STEM lesson, students will build a mini popsicle stick drone and use feedback control with an Arduino and an ultrasonic sensor to control the drone's altitude.
New
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-12th
Create a two-part system for filtering greywater. Teams will focus on communication and systems engineering as they build separate components to filter solid and liquid waste and then combine them into one device.
Learning Objectives
Students will:
Consider the potential effects of drought and how greywater could be part of the solution.
Design a system for filtering out solid waste or liquid waste.
Consider effective communication strategies with their team.
Collaborate on their design…
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
3 reviews
Classifying happy and sad faces is an easy task for most humans, but can we teach a machine to do it? In this fun lesson, students will use machine learning to try this out and see how easy it is for bias to creep in. This experiment requires no computer programming skills! In an optional extension, students will also use their imaginations to explore the potential benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence solutions. This lesson will give students an awareness of how prevalent artificial…
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: Kindergarten-3rd
2 reviews
Computational thinking is a problem-solving process that is used in everyday life as well as computer programs. In this lesson, students apply their computational thinking skills to explore the life cycle of a butterfly. They'll create an algorithm, or set of instructions, to model the life cycle of a butterfly. They will write this algorithm using conditionals and then program it on a computer.
Learning Objectives
Students will:
Analyze the life cycle of a butterfly.
Develop an algorithm…
Lesson Plan
Grade: 6th-8th
5 reviews
Have you or your students ever felt frustrated at not being able to access a favorite website or online game? Did you realize the site might have been a victim of a cyber-attack? If you aren't careful about online security, your own computer could even be used to launch the attack! In this fun lesson plan, you and your students will model one type of attack (a denial-of-service attack) and figure out how to protect the network against it (no computer programming required)!
NGSS Performance Expectations:
Lesson Plan
Grade: 9th-12th
Using the Netlogo platform to run simulations of a basic neural network called the perceptron, students explore a basic, yet powerful, model of machine learning as they are challenged to understand the logic. Students engage in the perceptron model and discover a weakness of the model. The students then move on to run simulations on Netlogo with the multi-layer perceptron which overcomes the weakness in the original perceptron model. Engineering Connection
Machine learning…
Lesson Plan
Grade: 4th
Here is a challenge for your students: you need to send a number to someone on the other side of the classroom. The twist? You are not allowed to talk, write the number down, or use gestures or sign language! How would you do it? In this project, your students will explore different means of transmitting information by sending a message to a phone that can graph light, sound, and vibrations using a specific sensor app. They will learn about different sensors and interpreting graphs, and use the…
NGSS Performance Expectations:
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