Search the California Content Standards

Standard:
Incorporate existing code, media, and libraries into original programs, and give attribution.

Descriptive Statement:
Building on the work of others enables students to produce more interesting and powerful creations. Students use portions of code, algorithms, digital media, and/or data created by others in their own programs and websites. They give attribution to the original creators to acknowledge their contributions. For example, when creating a side-scrolling game, students may incorporate portions of code that create a realistic jump movement from another person's game, and they may also import Creative Commons-licensed images to use in the background. Alternatively, when creating a website to demonstrate their knowledge of historical figures from the Civil War, students may use a professionally-designed template and public domain images of historical figures. (HSS.8.10.5) Additionally, students could import libraries and connect to web application program interfaces (APIs) to make their own programming processes more efficient and reduce the number of bugs (e.g., to check whether the user input is a valid date, to input the current temperature from another city).

Standard:
Distribute tasks and maintain a project timeline when collaboratively developing computational artifacts.

Descriptive Statement:
Collaboration is a common and crucial practice in programming development. Often, many individuals and groups work on the interdependent parts of a project together. Students assume pre-defined roles within their teams and manage the project workflow using structured timelines. With teacher guidance, they begin to create collective goals, expectations, and equitable workloads. For example, students could decompose the design stage of a game into planning the storyboard, flowchart, and different parts of the game mechanics. They can then distribute tasks and roles among members of the team and assign deadlines. Alternatively, students could work as a team to develop a storyboard for an animation representing a written narrative, and then program the scenes individually. (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy W.6.3, W.7.3, W.8.3)

Standard:
Document programs in order to make them easier to use, read, test, and debug.

Descriptive Statement:
Documentation allows creators, end users, and other developers to more easily use and understand a program. Students provide documentation for end users that explains their artifacts and how they function (e.g., project overview, user instructions). They also include comments within code to describe portions of their programs and make it easier for themselves and other developers to use, read, test, and debug. For example, students could add comments to describe functionality of different segments of code (e.g., input scores between 0 and 100, check for invalid input, calculate and display the average of the scores). They could also communicate the process used by writing design documents, creating flowcharts, or making presentations. (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy SL.6.5, SL.7.5, SL.8.5)

Standard:
Design a project that combines hardware and software components to collect and exchange data.

Descriptive Statement:
Collecting and exchanging data involves input, output, storage, and processing. When possible, students select the components for their project designs by considering tradeoffs between factors such as functionality, cost, size, speed, accessibility, and aesthetics. Students do not need to implement their project design in order to meet this standard. For example, students could design a mobile tour app that displays information relevant to specific locations when the device is nearby or when the user selects a virtual stop on the tour. They select appropriate components, such as GPS or cellular-based geolocation tools, textual input, and speech recognition, to use in their project design. Alternatively, students could design a project that uses a sensor to collect the salinity, moisture, and temperature of soil. They may select a sensor that connects wirelessly through a Bluetooth connection because it supports greater mobility, or they could instead select a physical USB connection that does not require a separate power source. (CA NGSS: MS-ETS1-1, MS-ETS1-2)

Standard:
Collect data using computational tools and transform the data to make it more useful.

Descriptive Statement:
Data collection has become easier and more ubiquitous. The cleaning of data is an important transformation for ensuring consistent format, reducing noise and errors (e.g., removing irrelevant responses in a survey), and/or making it easier for computers to process. Students build on their ability to organize and present data visually to support a claim, understanding when and how to transform data so information can be more easily extracted. Students also transform data to highlight or expose relationships. For example, students could use computational tools to collect data from their peers regarding the percentage of time technology is used for school work and entertainment, and then create digital displays of their data and findings. Students could then transform the data to highlight relationships representing males and females as percentages of a whole instead of as individual counts. (CA CCSS for Mathematics 6.SP.4, 7.SP.3, 8.SP.1, 8.SP.4) Alternatively, students could collect data from online forms and surveys, from a sensor, or by scraping a web page, and then transform the data to expose relationships. They could highlight the distribution of data (e.g., words on a web page, readings from a sensor) by giving quantitative measures of center and variability. (CA CCSS for Mathematics 6.SP.5.c, 7.SP.4)

Standard:
Compare tradeoffs associated with computing technologies that affect people's everyday activities and career options.

Descriptive Statement:
Advancements in computer technology are neither wholly positive nor negative. However, the ways that people use computing technologies have tradeoffs. Students consider current events related to broad ideas, including privacy, communication, and automation. For example, students could compare and contrast the impacts of computing technologies with the impacts of other systems developed throughout history such as the Pony Express and US Postal System. (HSS.7.8.4) Alternatively, students could identify tradeoffs for both personal and professional uses of a variety of computing technologies. For instance, driverless cars can increase convenience and reduce accidents, but they may be susceptible to hacking. The emerging industry will reduce the number of taxi and shared-ride drivers, but may create more software engineering and cybersecurity jobs.

Standard:
Collaborate with many contributors when creating a computational artifact.

Descriptive Statement:
Users have diverse sets of experiences, needs, and wants. These need to be understood and integrated into the design of computational artifacts. Students use applications that enable crowdsourcing to gather services, ideas, or content from a large group of people. At this level, crowdsourcing can be done at the local level (e.g., classroom, school, or neighborhood) and/or global level (e.g., age-appropriate online communities). For example, a group of students could use electronic surveys to solicit input from their neighborhood regarding an important social or political issue. They could collaborate with a community artist to combine animations and create a digital community collage informing the public about various points of view regarding the topic. (VAPA Visual Art 8.5.2, 8.5.4)

Standard:
Compare tradeoffs associated with licenses for computational artifacts to balance the protection of the creators' rights and the ability for others to use and modify the artifacts.

Descriptive Statement:
Using and building on the works of others allows people to create meaningful works and fosters innovation. Copyright is an important law that helps protect the rights of creators so they receive credit and get paid for their work. Creative Commons is a kind of copyright that makes it easier for people to copy, share, and build on creative work, as long as they give credit for it. There are different kinds of Creative Commons licenses that allow people to do things such as change, remix, or make money from their work. As creators, students can pick and choose how they want their work to be used, and then create a Creative Commons license that they include in their work. For example, students could create interactive animations to educate others on bullying or protecting the environment. They then select an appropriate license to reflect how they want their program to be used by others (e.g., allow others to use their work and alter it, as long as they do not make a profit from it). Students use established methods to both protect their artifacts and attribute use of protected artifacts.

Standard:
Compare tradeoffs between allowing information to be public and keeping information private and secure.

Descriptive Statement:
While it is valuable to establish, maintain, and strengthen connections between people online, security attacks often start with intentionally or unintentionally providing personal information online. Students identify situations where the value of keeping information public outweighs privacy concerns, and vice versa. They also recognize practices such as phishing and social engineering and explain best practices to defend against them. For example, students could discuss the benefits of artists and designers displaying their work online to reach a broader audience. Students could also compare the tradeoffs of making a shared file accessible to anyone versus restricting it to specific accounts. (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy SL.6.1, SL.7.1, SL.8.1) Alternatively, students could discuss the benefits and dangers of the increased accessibility of information available on the internet, and then compare this to the advantages and disadvantages of the introduction of the printing press in society. (HSS.7.8.4)

Standard:
Design algorithms to solve computational problems using a combination of original and existing algorithms.

Descriptive Statement:
Knowledge of common algorithms improves how people develop software, secure data, and store information. Some algorithms may be easier to implement in a particular programming language, work faster, require less memory to store data, and be applicable in a wider variety of situations than other algorithms. Algorithms used to search and sort data are common in a variety of software applications. For example, students could design an algorithm to calculate and display various sports statistics and use common sorting or mathematical algorithms (e.g., average) in the design of the overall algorithm. Alternatively, students could design an algorithm to implement a game and use existing randomization algorithms to place pieces randomly in starting positions or to control the "roll" of a dice or selection of a "card" from a deck.