Western Kauai MyCS Workshop (June 8-12, 2015)
Welcome! We look forward to working with you to share and improve our middle-years CS curriculum, MyCS!
Full workshop materials (slides, videos, etc.)
Workshop Links
Workshop Slides, per day:
Location and Parking We will meet at Waimea High School Portable Room C, from 9am - 3:30pm on June 8, 9, 10, and 12, with the option for some breakfast items at 8:30. (Lunch will be provided.) We will not meet on June 11, King Kamehameha Day.
Schedule Each morning will be a hands-on introduction to
try out and provide feedback on a part of the MyCS curriculum.
The afternoons are dedicated to
creating computation through computing projects.
Here is an estimate of each day's schedule
- 8:30 am: (optional) Coffee and breakfast items
- 9 am: Official start and welcome comments
- 9:30 am: Morning curriculum, part 1
- small-group activities
- thoughts/tailoring of lessons
- 10:45 am: Coffee, refilled... (or a break)
- til noon: Morning curriculum, part 2
- noon - 1 pm: Lunch and WhyCS
- 1 - 1:30 pm: CS context
- 1:30 - 3:30: Afternoon projects
- computing challenges
- reflections on the curriculum and surveys
MyCS Curriculum,
both online and offline.
Workshops' Overview
Week-long professional development workshops with the MyCS curriculum occur each summer in Claremont, CA and selected other locations. Each workshop, open to groups of 10-30 teachers, provides an overview of the curriculum along with in-depth practice with lesson plans from all of MyCS's units. Time is divided between discussions, hands-on activities, and opportunities to practice coding with Scratch, the programming language used most prominently in our curriculum.
These workshops have, at their heart, the same goals as the curriculum itself:
- To increase the CS content and skills available to middle-years (middle-school and early high-school) students and teachers
- To provide content that make both the student and teacher experience of CS as enjoyable and empowering as possible.
- To complement whatever pedagogical approach and personal-interaction style a teacher chooses to use.
- To deepen students' and teachers' identification with CS and sophistication with the discipline.
- To contribute as wide a variety of hands-on projects as possible, in order to "hook" as diverse a group of students and teachers as possible.
- To build context not only from current technologies, e.g., programming languages and consumer software, but from the fundamentals of the discipline, i.e., organizing data, algorithmic reasoning, and procedural composition.
The workshop is updated yearly to include curriculum revisions, as well as additional activities and topics to explore for our returning teachers.
All of the materials for previous versions of the workshop are available online for you to explore below.
2014's Pomona Unified PD workshop 2013's version 2012's version