Navigating Your CS Explorations Course

Find out how your CS Explorations course is structured to help you navigate the content and help your students succeed.

Your CS Explorations Course is built to provide you with all of the tools you need to help your students understand important concepts in the realm of computer science. In this article, we will break down the overall structure of the course and guide you through the basic components that constitute your resources for CS Explorations!

Structure of the Course

When you open your course, you will see that the content is divided into “blocks.” Each block contains Units and Projects:

The units contain lessons and activities that will prepare your students for the end-of-block projects, which are the primary pedagogical tool of the course.

There are also “Intersessions” at the bottom of the course page:

These are fun additional activities that you can work through with your students! They are not integral parts of the course content, but are rather supplemental materials that you can use in conjunction with the “core” content in the units and projects.

At the bottom of the course home page, you will find Course Resources:

These are important course-wide documents that will be very helpful for you throughout the process of teaching your CS Explorations course.

Unit and Lesson Overview

Each “unit” consists of several “lessons,” all working toward a common theme or goal described in the “Unit Overview” text at the top of the Unit page.

The Unit is further subdivided into Topics and finally into Lessons; you can open an individual lesson by clicking on the banner as shown below:

Each Lesson has a header that provides both a brief description and sample lesson flow for that lesson. Beneath these, you will find the lesson slides, which represent the core content of any given lesson.

Note that the slides are split into two groups: “end to end” and “modularized.” These are the same content, just packaged differently to give you flexibility with utilizing the slides in your classroom.

Lastly, you will see the “supplemental resources” below the slides:

This includes important lesson-related content, such as the coding activity / solution guides, as well as links to the gradebook in our customized LMS! Please note that, as you will need to manually grade all Scratch-based projects, the Gradebook only includes entries for the Check for Understanding quizzes that occur every five lessons (for more information, see below).

In addition, you may “open student view” to see any given student’s view of that particular lesson content. Note that there must be students enrolled in the course for you to make use of this feature, as you will be “pretending” to be a specific student when you open the student view.

Check for Understanding Quizzes

Every fifth lesson includes a brief recap quiz of the content thus far in the given unit. These quizzes are called “Check for Understanding.” Students will be able to click through to the quiz in our customary LMS and answer the questions upon your instruction; their completed grades will then automatically be recorded in your gradebook.

To access your gradebook, you can either click the “gradebook” button shown above in the supplementary resources section of any given lesson or go directly to the course portal in the custom LMS by clicking on this link, entering your course, and choosing “gradebook” from the navigation menu on the left.