Today's tasks
The Project Week, a Redesign, and Seeing the Whole
Today is the last day of this project and it is different in character from the ones before it. You will spend a short time on the project week materials, but most of today is about stepping back from the individual pieces you have been studying and asking the harder question: what kind of curriculum is this, and what do you actually think of it?
No more reading lesson pages. You have enough raw material. Today you build the argument.
Step 1 — Debrief Sprint 2 (5 min)
- Pull out the notes you jotted down for the Sprint 2 yellow box questions. Take a few minutes to share what you noticed with your group. You don't need to reach consensus — the goal is to surface what each person observed before moving into today's work.
- Pay particular attention to the TIPP&SEE question: did the framework stay alive in Weeks 3, 4, and 5, or did it quietly disappear? And did the unit you visited in the cross-unit look do anything that surprised you?
Step 2 — Evaluate the final project (15 min)
Navigate to the Project Week section of your unit's website. Open the Project Week Student Hyperdoc and any planning worksheet or rubric provided. Read through these materials with a teacher's eyes — not as a student completing the project, but as someone who has to decide whether this is a well-designed culminating assessment.
The project offers three entry points: Mild (modify an existing starter project), Medium (modify any prior lesson project), and Challenge (build from scratch). Think carefully about what each level actually asks of a student.
Discuss with your group: The Mild / Medium / Challenge scaffold gives students choices about how to enter the final project. Are students at each level demonstrating the same things at different depths, or doing genuinely different work? Then think beyond this curriculum: where else could a similar entry-point scaffold work well — in ELA, science, social studies, or math? What would Mild / Medium / Challenge look like in a writing assignment or a science investigation?
Step 3 — Redesign one thing (20 min)
As a group, identify one specific aspect of your unit's curriculum design that you would change. Use the five-week chart you have been building as evidence. The change can be anything — the sequence of CS concepts, the placement of a CS+Me lesson, the structure of the final project, the way a particular week connects CS to the subject matter.
Be specific. "We would make the integration stronger" is not a redesign. "We would move the Password Safety CS+Me lesson from Week 1 to Week 3, because by Week 3 students understand events well enough to think about what triggers a password prompt" is a redesign.
Write a brief rationale. You are not rewriting the curriculum — you are making one focused, well-reasoned change you can defend.
Discuss with your group: Share your proposed redesign. Does everyone agree it would be an improvement, or is there disagreement? If there is disagreement, what underlying difference in values or priorities is driving it? Keep your notes — this conversation will resurface when we meet as a class.
Step 4— See the whole flower (10 min)
Over the past three sessions you have examined this curriculum piece by piece — its framework, its CS concepts, its integration with a subject area, its digital citizenship strand, and its final project. That kind of close examination is necessary. But there is a risk that comes with it: you can become so focused on the individual parts that you lose sight of the whole.
A botanist studying a flower might spend days on the roots, then the stalk, then the leaves, then the petals. But at some point the botanist has to step back and ask: what kind of flower is this? What is it doing? How do all of these parts work together as a single living thing?
Take 10 minutes — quietly, individually — to look back at your unit's home page one more time. You have now been inside every lesson. What do you see now that you couldn't have seen the first time you looked at it? Write down two or three observations before the session ends. These will anchor your written reflection responses below.
For your project document
Former Day 7 Reflection Questions
Record your responses to these questions in your reflection document. These are individual written responses, even though you developed the redesign as a group.
- As you wrap up today, describe the redesign your group proposed. What specifically would you change, and what is your rationale? Do you personally agree with the group's decision, or would you have made a different choice? Explain.
- The final project's Mild / Medium / Challenge options offer students differentiated entry points. As a future elementary teacher, how would you use this approach in your classroom — would you assign entry points based on what you know about each student, let students choose freely, or use some other approach? What are the tradeoffs, and what does your answer say about your philosophy of differentiation?
- Looking at the final project as an assessment instrument: how well does it measure what this curriculum actually teaches? Is there anything the curriculum spends significant time on that the project does not assess — or anything the project rewards that the curriculum doesn't spend much time building?
Former Day 8 Reflection Questions
These are the final questions in your reflection document. Answer them individually and thoughtfully — they will form the basis for our class discussion when we meet again, and they are the primary way I will evaluate your engagement with this project overall.
- Now that you have seen the whole unit, how would you describe it as a single designed thing to someone who had never encountered it? Not what it contains week by week, but what it is — what it is trying to accomplish for students, and what vision of CS education it represents. What do you think it gets right about that vision?
- Over five weeks of content plus a final project, how well did this unit actually integrate computer science with its subject matter? Was the integration genuine and deepening as the weeks progressed, or did it feel more like two parallel tracks running alongside each other? Point to at least two specific moments from different weeks that support your answer.
- You explored at least one other unit today. Which unit did you visit, and what is one thing it does meaningfully differently from yours — in its CS concept sequence, its approach to integration, its project, or its overall character? What does that difference reveal about the range of design choices available when building an integrated CS curriculum?
- Having now studied one unit deeply and glimpsed at least one other: what is your overall evaluation of the CS+Elementary Project as an approach to teaching computer science in elementary school? What does it do well? Where does it fall short? And knowing what you now know about how this curriculum is designed, would you want to teach with it? Why or why not?