Teaching Impacts of Technology: Fundamentals

Welcome! Are you interested in teaching about the impacts of the technology you use everyday? To learn more about the computation and computing concepts that underlie those technologies? We'll be using a problem-based approach to explore interesting ways to teach concepts of networks and the internet, data and analysis, and even algorithms and data representation. Finally, we'll evaluate, critique and improve/personalize an "unplugged activity" where students learn how to create the minimal network needed to provide connectivity amongst a set of houses. This activity can be scaled for use in grade levels from 4th grade to 12th grade.

How do you interact with and benefit from technology in a 24 hour period? We'll ask you to track your technology use and reflect on its costs and benefits to you. We'll also start by looking at a problem many people might have in a given 24 hour period -- being hungry and wanting someone to bring them some food! We'll explore several smartphone apps related to this including doordash, yelp, and lyft.

Streaming media has had huge impacts not only on consumer choice, but on who is enabled to produce digital media -- be it entertainment or education. Then we'll look at some of the limitations and possible new advances in this area.

This week our work falls into 2 categories. The impacts computing has had on our lives so far may not be the entire story. The CSTA K-12 standards focus a lot on having students not only look at the past, but consider impacts of future advances. Second, we reflect on core constructivist learning theory -- but with a specific focus on teaching computing concepts.

We'll evaluate a "CS Unplugged" lesson plan that supports students in learning how to represent real world map/travel representations in a graph. This lesson plan extends upon the "Paving a Muddy City" online simulator you used earlier in the course. We'll walk through a revised lesson plan and ask you to help improve it by added vocabulary and assessment items. You'll be able to contribute to and access a crowdsources set of resources created by other learners in this class!