The Iowa CS Standards
Background
When designing instruction, it is incredibly important to understand what national, state, and local standards you are supposed to be addressing. As part of this course, I think that it is important that we think about the Iowa Standards (which also happen to be the National CSTA Standards).
Reading
- To begin with check out:
- Iowa and Computer Science Education - Full page for CS education related things in Iowa
- Spend some time poking around at the various links and get a feel for how Iowa treats/views Computer Science
- Next, download a copy of the Iowa CS standards
- https://educateiowa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/IowaComputerScienceStandards.pdf
- While this is a large document, we are going to limit our attention to only certain portions.
- Please use the following process:
- Read through the entire K-12 standards tables on pages 3-6. While we are going to focus on only a small part of this table for this project, I think it is important that you understand the big picture context. In particular, pleas pay attention to how certain topics track from kindergarten through high school. Notice that there is, what appears to be, a lot of repetition. But, in fact, when you look carefully at the language used it isn't repetition as much as development of depth on those ideas. Spend enough time with this document (15-20 minutes) that you understand the overall structure.
- Scroll down the document and notice how pages 7-35 relate back to the table on pages 3-6. In particular, notice that there is an entire column (what would be labeled as 3b) missing from the table on pages 3-6. This won't have an impact on this assignment, but it is something that you should be aware of.
- Find the standards labeled 3A-AP-13 through 3A-AP-23. (pp 27-29) These will be the standards we will be working with for this assignment. Read through these carefully so that you understand the standards a typical high school programming course would be attempting to meet.
- For each of these 11 programming standards I want you think through what you have learned so far in our course sequence. Use the Google Form link provided below to record your answers to the following questions about each of the eleven standards listed:
- Do you feel like you observed this standard in the way your FOP course was taught?
- If "yes" - When and/or how
- If "no" - What kind of activity do you think this course could have utilized to better address this standard?
- [Note, I realize that for one or two of these, when the answer is "No" it may be very hard for you to answer this question since you may not know what the standard is even saying. But for many others I think you will understand the standard even without direct instruction and I think you can imagine/envision activities that would have addressed this standard. Please give this question an honest attempt at an answer.]
- Even if you haven't seen it in your FOP course, do you feel like you have enough other knowledge related to this standard to think about incorporating it into your classroom?
- If "yes" - What kinds of activities (in addition to the ones you observed in our classroom) do you feel would address this standard.
- If "no" - Why not [Again, this is tightly tied to the No in part 1 but it is actually a different question.
- Do you feel like you observed this standard in the way your FOP course was taught?
Submission
I will be grading this on purely a 1/0 basis. You get credit for submitting something "on time" and that shows that you put time and effort/thought into crafting a meaningful response.
I do not see there being any right or wrong answers in this activity. Similarly, length of your answer does not necessarily correlate with the quality of your answers. Instead, I will be looking to see if you have considered a broad set of ideas/concepts for this reflection and will be looking at the clarity with which you have crafted your response(s). This includes things like spelling, grammar, formatting, etc.
Please submit this via this Google Form by the end of the week.