CS Curriculum
Most students will not pursue careers as professional programmers or computer scientists but developing (computational) fluency with coding is valuable for everyone. As students create their own stories, games, and animations with code, they start to see themselves as creators, developing confidence and pride in their ability to create things and express themselves with new technologies.
Mitchel Resnick and Natalie Rusk ~ MIT Media Lab ~ "Coding at a Crossroads," ~ Communications of the ACM ~ November 2020
CS4NorCal Curricular Options
CS4NorCal will provide free access to a variety of high quality, free or low-cost, industry-validated CS curriculum. Resources include:
Elementary grades:
CS Fundamentals from Code.org
CS First, from Google for Education
Scratch Jr Extension and Scratch Encore, from MIT
Middle school grades:
CS Discoveries, from Code.org
Bootstrap Algebra, from Brown University (integrating CS and algebra)
Project Guts, from MIT (integrating CS and science)
High school grades:
CS Discoveries, from Code.org
Exploring CS, from UCLA and the University of Oregon
CS Principles & AP CS Principles, from Code.org
AP Computer Science A, from the College Board
Technological Expectations
Some of you might be wondering whether your school need to make a significant investment in computer hardware before participating in CS4NorCal. Generally, speaking, schools can offer Computer Science instruction using the computers they already have. Curriculum providers offer specific technology requirements (which are often minimal). As an example, here are the Code.org technology requirements: https://support.code.org/hc/en-us/articles/202591743-Technical-requirements-for-Code-org.