Search every subject world, from Preschool to Grade 12. The first five courses of every subject path are free.
33 courses
Computers & Digital Literacy · Every grade
A hands-on start for anyone new to computers, tablets or PlayOwl. Children really point, click, tap, drag, scroll, zoom and type, open and close tabs and windows, search on a pretend web, and take a tour of PlayOwl, all inside safe practice screens. It works with a mouse, a touch screen or a keyboard.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners sort machine-learning requests into classification, regression and clustering, read a dataset as examples, features and a label, and learn to ask what a label really measures. They then frame projects before any model exists: the decision, the people affected, the cost of each error, a success criterion and a baseline. The course ends by deciding when a simple rule, more data or human judgment is the better choice.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners read a resource-monitor snapshot to find out what is really using a computer's processor and memory, explain why security patches matter and plan a sensible update routine, apply least privilege with standard and administrator accounts and an acceptable-use policy, and weigh a device's lifecycle, energy use and e-waste options. Shared computers at a fictional town library and high school run through the whole course.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Defensive security starts with understanding what you are protecting. Learners inventory the assets of a fictional public library, describe harm with confidentiality, integrity and availability, separate threats from vulnerabilities and controls, rate risks with a likelihood-times-impact matrix, and build a first threat model for a fictional food pantry's volunteer sign-up website.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners turn categories and text into numbers with one-hot encoding and word counts, and rescale numeric features with min-max scaling using training-data limits. They then examine how the data a model learns from can mislead it: sampling variability versus representation bias (with a sampling simulation), and measurement, label and historical bias in fictional datasets, each paired with a mitigation.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners rebuild a community garden's handbook the way professionals structure long documents: named styles and a logical heading hierarchy that drive navigation and a generated table of contents, real lists and data tables instead of layout tricks, readable typography and visual hierarchy, and templates, alt text for charts and accessible export so the document works for every reader.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners separate identification, authentication, authorization and accountability, compare authentication factors and multi-factor methods, calculate how the number of possible codes grows with length, and apply least privilege, role-based access and separation of duties to fictional organizations. The course ends with the access lifecycle: joiners, movers, leavers and a real access review.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Using only toy examples, learners build the vocabulary of cryptography with a shift cipher and see why its tiny key space makes it useless for real secrets. They compare shared-key and public-key encryption, explore hashing with a deliberately weak toy hash, and finish with digital signatures, certificates, what the browser padlock really means, and good key-management habits.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners build three simple models entirely by hand on small fictional datasets: a one-feature threshold learned by counting the errors of each candidate cutoff, a two-level decision tree grown by choosing the split with the fewest errors, and a k-nearest-neighbors classifier using Euclidean distance and a majority vote. They then compare hand-written rules with learned models on transparency, maintenance, adaptability and data needs.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Using a fictional bike-share's trip log, learners make formulas copy correctly with relative, absolute and mixed references, summarize data with COUNTIF, SUMIF and AVERAGEIF, classify with nested IF and retrieve values with an exact-match lookup. They then judge data against six quality dimensions, design validation rules, and audit a sheet for error values and the silent mistakes that produce plausible but wrong numbers.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners follow a request from Cedar Valley High to a library catalog server and back: across independently run networks joined by open standards, hop by hop through routing tables that adapt when a link fails, using IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, after a DNS lookup that climbs from resolver to root to top-level domain to authoritative server, and finally as TCP or UDP traffic carrying HTTP requests and responses. Along the way they separate the web from the internet it runs on.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
In a toy model of a library network, learners split a flat network into zones, evaluate firewall rule tables where the first matching rule wins and everything else is denied, read fictional sign-in and connection logs for warning signs, and choose hardening controls such as replacing default passwords and closing internet-facing admin pages. Everything happens on paper-style tables; no real networks are touched.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners split data into training, validation and test sets and compute the counts for common splits. They use validation results to choose settings such as k and tree depth, read the overfitting signature in training and validation error, and learn why the test set is used only once. They then hunt for data leakage in fictional project logs and choose stratified, time-based or group splits when a simple random split would mislead.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners evaluate a fictional leak-detection model the way practitioners do: they build confusion matrices and compute accuracy, precision, recall, specificity and F1 with the real formulas, compare the model with a majority-class baseline, and measure regression error with mean absolute error. They then choose a decision threshold from the costs of each error type and break errors down by subgroup and by error type to recommend next steps.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners look at a fictional food pantry's volunteer app from the builder's side. They validate untrusted input with allowlists on the server, apply secure-by-design principles such as least privilege, safe failure and careful error messages, handle data responsibly from collection to deletion, and turn security requirements into concrete test cases.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
After a fictional app breach leads to a stolen account, learners rebuild one student's digital security from the ground up: passphrases and password managers backed by simple counting, multi-factor methods and their tradeoffs, and account recovery as the hidden weak point. They then look outward at how tracking and data brokers build profiles, practise data minimization and privacy settings, and audit and shape a digital identity with deliberate sharing choices.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Following one student's research on protected bike lanes, learners write precise searches with operators and Boolean logic, weigh primary and secondary evidence, peer review and conflicts of interest, and check claims by reading laterally. They then attribute sources and media completely and decide how works may be reused under copyright, the public domain, Creative Commons licenses and, at a general level, the U.S. fair-use factors.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners explain models globally and locally: they compute permutation feature importance as the drop in performance when a feature is scrambled, and write counterfactual explanations for individual decisions, judging whether they are actionable. They then study what explanations cannot tell us (correlation is not causation; out-of-distribution inputs) and design human oversight with review queues, appeals and override logs that counter automation bias.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners study how social engineering exploits ordinary human responses such as urgency, authority and helpfulness, then practice reading sender addresses and web addresses to find the domain that really controls a link. They learn to verify through a separate, known channel, respond calmly after a mistake, and design organizational defenses that cover email, phone, text messages, QR codes and in-person tricks. All messages are fictional and use reserved example domains.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners look inside generative AI far enough to see why fluent output can be false: models predict likely next tokens (or pixels) from patterns, and sampling makes answers vary. They then practise a verification workflow that splits output into checkable claims and records each result, spot fabricated citations, write clear and private requests with honest disclosure, and learn why synthetic-media detectors cannot settle authenticity on their own.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners follow a fictional food pantry through a realistic account-compromise incident, from a lookalike email to a copied volunteer list. They learn the phases and roles of incident response, separate events from incidents and rate severity, build a timeline from several logs while preserving evidence, and practice clear, factual communication and a blameless post-incident review with owned action items.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners apply data minimization, purpose limitation and meaningful consent to fictional data plans, then measure re-identification risk by counting how many records share the same quasi-identifiers before and after generalization, suppression and aggregation. They read and write model cards and dataset datasheets, and plan governance across a model's life: impact assessment, named roles, monitoring for drift, and people's rights to access and correct their data.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
The elective's capstone. Learners carry out a complete, strictly defensive security review of a fictional bike co-op: they agree written permission and scope, gather evidence from documents, settings and interviews with a checklist, rate and prioritize findings, write specific recommendations with owners and dates, and present a clear report with a plain-language executive summary and a follow-up plan.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
Learners carry out a complete, small modeling project on a fictional library dataset: they frame the problem and fix a success criterion, check the data for leakage, minimization and quality problems, make a time-based split, compute baselines, build and choose between a threshold model and a small decision tree on validation data, evaluate the chosen model once on the test set, analyze errors by subgroup, and write a model card that a teacher reviews against a rubric.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 9
In this project course, learners plan and build a digital portfolio for a real purpose and audience. They curate a small set of strong artifacts with specific reflections, design a simple structure with consistent navigation, check accessibility, scrub personal and hidden data, license their own work and credit others, then gather feedback, prioritize revisions and write a design rationale that brings together the whole Grade 9 path.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 10
Learners move fluently between binary, decimal and hexadecimal, reason about the limits of fixed-width storage and what happens on overflow, and calculate the uncompressed size of images and audio from their parameters. They then compress data by hand with run-length encoding, measure compression ratios, and decide when lossless or lossy compression is the right tool.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 10
Networks lose, damage and delay data all the time, yet messages still arrive intact. Learners analyze redundant paths and single points of failure, trace how acknowledgments, timeouts and retransmission repair packet loss, detect errors with a parity bit and a toy checksum, and calculate transfer times from latency, throughput, bottlenecks and header overhead.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 10
Learners take a web page apart: the requests that assemble it, the parts of its URL, the HTML that gives it structure and the CSS that styles it. They then evaluate pages the way assistive technology experiences them, checking alt text, link text, form labels, contrast ratios and keyboard focus, and recommend fixes with reasons.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 10
Learners follow primary and foreign keys across related tables, model many-to-many relationships with junction tables, and see how storing the same fact in many places causes update, insertion and deletion anomalies that normalization prevents. They read SQL-like queries with SELECT, WHERE and ORDER BY and predict their results, then compare metadata, folders and tags as ways to organize and find information.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 10
Through fictional, safe scenarios, learners classify incidents by the confidentiality, integrity and availability they harm, separate threats from vulnerabilities, and score risks with a likelihood × impact matrix. They triage fictional phishing messages and lookalike links, then plan layered defenses: patching priorities, backups that survive ransomware, and clear incident reports. Everything is defensive: recognition, prevention, detection, response and recovery.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 10
Learners look inside predictive AI systems through small fictional datasets: features and labels, a rule learned from training examples, and why models must be judged on separate test data. They diagnose overfitting, distribution shift and proxy features, discover with simple counts why accuracy misleads when events are rare, and write the limitations a responsible team should document.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 10
Following a youth council team writing a grant proposal, learners set sharing permissions and link settings by least privilege, use version history, naming conventions and changelogs to track and restore work, and resolve conflicting edits by comparing each version with the common original. They finish by defining team roles and the asynchronous communication norms that keep shared work moving.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 10
In this project course, learners act as consultants for the Cedar Valley Tool Library, which lends tools to residents and has outgrown its paper sign-up sheets. They analyze the system's people, processes, data, hardware and software, write testable functional and non-functional requirements, trace how data flows and where protections belong, and then compare two fictional products with weighted criteria before writing a justified recommendation.
