Week 2 Schedule and Activities
In Week 2, you will:
- Learn about the foundational hardware components of a computer: logic gates, the CPU, primary memory, secondary memory, and ports.
- Understand how the three classes of mass storage differ in how they work, how they fail, and when each is the right choice.
- Explore how the hardware components work together to execute a program through the Fetch-Decode-Execute cycle.
- Connect these ideas to what K–12 students might encounter in your classroom.
The schedule below is a suggested pacing guide. Feel free to adjust based on your
own calendar, but try to keep the order of activities so later pieces build on earlier ones.
Computer Science Content
(Monday – Wednesday)
Work through the Week 2 learning materials in order. These are designed to build your
understanding of the core CS concept for the week: computer hardware and data
manipulation.
- Topic 2a — Logic Gates
Discover how simple electronic switches (logic gates) form the foundation of all
computation. You will see how gates combine to create circuits that perform meaningful
operations on data.
- Topic 2b — Inside the CPU
Explore the components inside the CPU — the ALU, Control Unit, registers, Program
Counter, and Instruction Register — and learn how registers, RAM, and secondary
storage work together as a memory hierarchy.
- Topic 2c — Memory and Storage
Examine the three classes of mass storage: magnetic, optical, and flash. Understand how
each works physically, how each fails, and why all three still coexist in modern
computing.
- Topic 2d — Ports and Controllers
Investigate how computers communicate with the outside world through ports and
controllers, and identify the ports you will encounter on classroom devices.
- Topic 2e — The Fetch-Decode-Execute Cycle
Bring everything together by tracing how a program moves from secondary storage into RAM
and through the CPU, instruction by instruction, in the cycle that drives all
computation.
Beyond the Content
(Thursday – Friday)
Once you have spent some time engaging with explicit CS content it is helpful to rethink
this content through several different lenses.
Small Group Discussion
(Thursday – Friday)
You will meet with your small group to make sense of the week and to prepare for the
Competency Demo.
Full directions and prompts for this week's small group discussion are on a separate
page:
Week 2 Small Group Discussion Instructions
Competency Demo
(By Sunday)
Competency Demo #2 — Computer Hardware and Data Manipulation
- Complete all Week 2 activities before attempting the Competency Demo.
- The CD addresses Competencies 3, 4, 5, and 6. Review those learning objectives before you begin.
- Closed book, closed notes, closed resources. You may have a sheet of scratch paper available if you find that helpful.