Search the California Content Standards

Standard:
Describe choices made during program development using code comments, presentations, and demonstrations.

Descriptive Statement:
People communicate about their code to help others understand and use their programs. Explaining one's design choices gives others a better understanding of one's work. Students may explain their step-by-step process of creating a program in a presentation or demonstration of their personal code journals. They describe how comments within code organize thought and process during the develpment of the program. For example, students could describe the decision to have the score in a game flash when it can be rounded to 100 by writing a comment in the code. (CA CCSS for Mathematics 3.NBT.1) Alternatively, students could present their overall program development experience and justify choices made by using storyboards, annotated images, videos, and/or journal entries. (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy SL.3.4, SL.4.4, SL.5.4, SL.3.5, SL.4.5, SL.5.5) (CA NGSS: 3-5-ETS1-1, 3.5-ETS1-2, 3.5-ETS1-3)

Standard:
Describe how computing devices connect to other components to form a system.

Descriptive Statement:
Computing devices often depend on other devices or components. Students describe physical and wireless connections to other components, including both input devices (e.g., keyboards, sensors, remote controls, microphones) and output devices (e.g., 3D printers, monitors, speakers). For example, students could describe the relationship among the heart, lungs, muscles, blood, and oxygen during physical activity and then compare this to how a mouse, keyboard, printer, and desktop computer connect and interact to allow for input, processing, and output. (P.E.3.4.7) Alternatively, when describing how light reflected from objects enters the eye and is then transferred to the brain to construct a visual image, students could compare this to a computing system that uses programming to construct a visual image when data is transferred and constructed/reconstructed through a keyboard, camera, or other components. (CA NGSS: 4-PS4-2)

Standard:
Organize and present collected data visually to highlight relationships and support a claim.

Descriptive Statement:
Raw data has little meaning on its own. Data is often sorted or grouped to provide additional clarity. Organizing data can make interpreting and communicating it to others easier. Data points can be clustered by a number of commonalities. The same data could be manipulated in different ways to emphasize particular aspects or parts of the data set. For example, students could create and administer electronic surveys to their classmates. Possible topics could include favorite books, family heritage, and after school activities. Students could then create digital displays of the data they have collected such as column histogram charts showing the percent of respondents in each grade who selected a particular favorite book. Finally, students could make quantitative statements supported by the data such as which books are more appealing to specific ages of students. As an extension, students could write an opinion piece stating a claim and supporting it with evidence from the data they collected. (CA CCSS for Mathematics 3.MD.3, 4.MD.4, 5.MD.2) (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy W.3.1, W.4.1, W.5.1) Alternatively, students could represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe weather experienced in the last several years. They could select the type of graphical display based on the specific data represented (e.g., daily high/low temperatures on a scatter plot, average temperatures for a month across years in a column chart). Students could then make a claim about expected weather in future months based on the data. (CA NGSS: 3-ESS2-1)

Standard:
Use data to highlight and/or propose relationships, predict outcomes, or communicate ideas.

Descriptive Statement:
The accuracy of data analysis is related to how the data is represented. Inferences or predictions based on data are less likely to be accurate if the data is insufficient, incomplete, or inaccurate or if the data is incorrect in some way. Additionally, people select aspects and subsets of data to be transformed, organized, and categorized. Students should be able to refer to data when communicating an idea, in order to highlight and/or propose relationships, predict outcomes, highlight different views and/or communicate insights and ideas. For example, students can be provided a scenario in which they are city managers who have a specific amount of funds to improve a city in California. Students can collect data of a city concerning land use, vegetation, wildlife, climate, population density, services and transportation (HSS.4.1.5) to determine and present what area needs to be focused on to improve a problem. Students can compare their data and planned use of funds with peers, clearly communicating or predict outcomes based on data collected. (CA CCCS for ELA/Literacy SL.3.1, SL.4.1, SL.5.1) Alternatively, students could record the temperature at noon each day to show that temperatures are higher in certain months of the year. If temperatures are not recorded on non-school days or are recorded incorrectly, the data would be incomplete and ideas being communicated could be inaccurate. Students may also record the day of the week on which the data was collected, but this would have no relevance to whether temperatures are higher or lower. In order to have sufficient and accurate data on which to communicate the idea, students might use data provided by a governmental weather agency. (CA NGSS: 3-ESS2-1)

Standard:
Propose ways to improve the accessibility and usability of technology products for the diverse needs and wants of users.

Descriptive Statement:
The development and modification of computing technology is driven by people’s needs and wants and can affect groups differently. Students anticipate the needs and wants of diverse end users and propose ways to improve access and usability of technology, with consideration of potential perspectives of users with different backgrounds, ability levels, points of view, and disabilities. For example, students could research a wide variety of disabilities that would limit the use of traditional computational tools for the creation of multimedia artifacts, including digital images, songs, and videos. Students could then brainstorm and propose new software that would allow students that are limited by the disabilities to create similar artifacts in new ways (e.g., graphical display of music for the deaf, the sonification of images for visually impaired students, voice input for those that are unable to use traditional input like the mouse and the keyboard). (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy W.3.7, W.4.7, W.5.7) Alternatively, as they anticipate unique user needs, students may consider using both speech and text to convey information in a game. They may also wish to vary the types of programs they create, knowing that not everyone shares their own tastes. (CA NGSS: 3-5-ETS1-1, 3-5-ETS1-2, 3-5-ETS1-3)

Standard:
Seek and explain the impact of diverse perspectives for the purpose of improving computational artifacts.

Descriptive Statement:
Computing technologies enable global collaboration and sharing of ideas. Students solicit feedback from a diverse group of users and creators and explain how this input improves their computational artifacts. For example, students could seek feedback from classmates via user surveys, in order to create an idea and then make a claim as to how to improve the overall structure and function of their computational artifact. Using the feedback students could write an opinion piece supporting their claim. (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy W.3.1, W.4.1, W.5.1) Alternatively, with guidance from their teacher, students could use video conferencing tools, shared documents, or other online collaborative spaces, such as blogs, wikis, forums, or website comments, to gather and synthesize feedback from individuals and groups about programming projects. (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy SL.3.1, SL.4.1, SL.5.1)

Standard:
Describe reasons creators might limit the use of their work.

Descriptive Statement:
Ethical complications arise from the opportunities provided by computing. With the ease of sending and receiving copies of media on the Internet, in formats such as video, photos, and music, students consider the opportunities for unauthorized use, such as online piracy and disregard of copyrights. The license of a downloaded image or audio file may restrict modification, require attribution, or prohibit use entirely. For example, students could take part in a collaborative discussion regarding reasons why musicians who sell their songs in digital format choose to license their work so that they can earn money for their creative efforts. If others share the songs without paying for them, the musicians do not benefit financially and may struggle to produce music in the future. (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy SL.3.1, SL.4.1, SL.5.1) Alternatively, students could review the rights and reproduction guidelines for digital artifacts on a publicly accessible media source. They could then state an opinion with reasons they believe these guidelines are in place. (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy W.3.1, W.4.1, W.5.1)

Standard:
Seek and incorporate feedback from team members and users to refine a solution that meets user needs.

Descriptive Statement:
Development teams that employ user-centered design processes create solutions (e.g., programs and devices) that can have a large societal impact (e.g., an app that allows people with speech difficulties to allow a smartphone to clarify their speech). Students begin to seek diverse perspectives throughout the design process to improve their computational artifacts. Considerations of the end-user may include usability, accessibility, age-appropriate content, respectful language, user perspective, pronoun use, or color contrast. For example, if students are designing an app to teach their classmates about recycling, they could first interview or survey their classmates to learn what their classmates already know about recycling and why they do or do not recycle. After building a prototype of the app, the students could then test the app with a sample of their classmates to see if they learned anything from the app and if they had difficulty using the app (e.g., trouble reading or understanding text). After gathering interview data, students could refine the app to meet classmate needs. (CA NGSS: MS-ETS1-4)

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:
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)