Reflection 3.3 - The Iowa CS Standards

When designing instruction it is incredibly important to understand what national, state, and local standards you are supposed to be addressing. To get started with this project I think that is is absolutely necessary that you THOROUGHLY understand the Iowa Computer Science Standards.

To begin with, download a copy of the Iowa CS standards

While this is a large document we are going to limit our attention to only certain portions. Please use the following process:

  1. 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 our final 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.
  2. 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 our project, but it is something that you should be aware of.
  3. Find the standards labeled 3A-AP-13 through 3A-AP-23.  These will be the standards we will be working with for this project.  Read through these carefully so that you understand the standards a typical high school programming course would be attempting to meet.  Come to your small group meeting prepared to talk about these standards.