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Ask HN: Computer Curriculum for Grades 9-12

4 points by Yzupnick ↗ HN
I have been asked by a local private school to help come up with a computer curriculum for their students grade 9-12. (ages 14 -18) The school wants to make sure that every student graduates with enough computer knowledge for College/Work. The kids come into the school with a wide variety of backgrounds. Some have no typing skills and minimal interactions with any software other at all other than Word, while others have can touch type, have worked with Photoshop, and sometimes even some basic web editing.

Here are my current thoughts: 9th Grade: Touch Typing, Internet research(for you own problems), Basic computer concepts, what is an OS, what are the different hardware parts. What do different computer specs mean. How to purchase a computer

10th Grade: Word, Publisher (more importantly I think, Word vs. Publisher), Excel, and Access (again excel vs. Access), (I use the Microsoft Office names, but I probably will make a point of not using the Microsoft version of these products.)

11th Grade: How the internet works, maybe basic html/css

12th Grade: Light programming, maybe javascript, possibly using codeacademy or codehs.com

These are minimum for each grades, not what the students who want to learn more will be offered.

I would really appreciate some input from the HN community.

5 comments

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robomartin
More context might be needed here.

Where I live kids are interacting with computer way before they get to High School. I mean, five year olds are using computers and the Internet. To wait until HS to introduce some of these topics seems wrong. For example, all the local middle schools have some sort of a Lego Mindstorms class (some good, some bad, but they do have them).

stevenameyer
This. What is the point of the curriculum? Are you trying to introduce them to what computers are and how they work from a hardware level? Basic user interactions of an average computer user? Office/business/presentation specialized skills? Intro into how software works and programming?

Computers are tools used by most people in a lot of different capacities, and depending on how people use them they need to learn different things. It all depends what you want then to walk away from the courses knowing.

Yzupnick
That is really the question I'm asking. What should every single high school student walk away with? Should it be knowledge of hardware? Specific software? General software?
stevenameyer
If that is the case then I would say giving a high level over view of pretty much everything about computers is probably what you want. Individual areas can become very deep and diving too much into the specifics will be time consuming and will not likely to benefit kids who do not go into that area.

Some topics off the top of my head that are pretty good for providing a broad understanding that could likely be used by everyone are:

-Typing

-basic browsing of computers

-Hardware vs Firmware vs Software

-How the internet works

-Browsers

-Concepts of basic security and protecting your information online

-Main parts of a computer and what are they responsible for

-Troubleshooting basic computer problems

-What programming is

-How to use commonly used programs (ie word, excel, powerpoint etc)

I think areas like these are good to give someone an idea of how computers work, how to use them on a day to day basis, and how things relate to each other. But I don't think that this is really enough material to cover four years worth of learning.

Some areas that maybe useful to teach kids about but won't likely be beneficial to everyone going forward:

-Programming (focus more on the logic and concepts as oppose to language specifics)

-experience with different OSs

-Specifics of how main components work internally

-Using the command line/terminal

-Basic Analog and Digital circuitry as it relates to computers

-Computer networking

-Photoshop

-CAD

But this is probably to much information for high schoolers, and can become very deep and dense. Again it all depends on how deep you want to go.

Yzupnick
The school is in NY. The kids come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Most, have been interacting with computers for years. However, a significant percentage, have effectively no interaction (the reason for this is a whole other topic.) What we are trying to do is 1)understand exactly what we should be teaching the kids who have no background, in order to "catch them up." and 2) Understand what pieces of knowledge should every single graduating student have.

Maybe I'm setting the bar to low. I don't know, that is why I am asking.