Search every subject world, from Preschool to Grade 12. The first five courses of every subject path are free.
17 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 7
Learners open up a computer one layer at a time: the processor's control unit, ALU and registers running the fetch–decode–execute cycle, what clock speed and cores really change, and why every computer needs both fast, volatile memory and large, non-volatile storage arranged in a hierarchy. The course ends with choosing and justifying computer setups for fictional users in the town of Cedar Valley.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 7
Learners see how agreed rules (protocols) let computers talk reliably, tracing how TCP numbers, acknowledges and resends data. They find out exactly what HTTPS protects and what the padlock does not prove, build and break a toy shift cipher to see why real encryption needs huge key spaces, and learn how multi-factor authentication, updates, backups and least privilege defend against common threats. Everything is defensive and set in the fictional town of Cedar Valley.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 7
Learners follow the Cedar Valley Middle School Green Commute club from a question to a chart: turning a vague question into a data plan, choosing between surveys, observation and sensor logs, and then cleaning real-looking messy data (duplicates, inconsistent labels, missing values, impossible values and unit mismatches). They keep a cleaning log and see how much dirty data can change an average or a chart.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 7
Learners use spreadsheets to help make decisions. They write IF formulas that choose between results, use absolute references so one input cell can feed a whole column, build a budget model for a fictional club trip and run what-if tests, and compare options with a weighted decision matrix. The course ends by examining a model's assumptions and why its output is an estimate, not a fact.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 7
Learners become careful readers of the media they meet every day. They tell news reports from opinion, analysis, sponsored content and satire; compare headlines with the articles under them and spot loaded language; check photos and videos that are edited or shown out of context; separate misinformation from disinformation; and see how recommendation feeds shape what they see. Lateral reading ties it together as a quick, practical habit.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 7
Learners look inside simple AI models. They train a toy message classifier by hand from labeled examples, watch it make confident mistakes that show it finds patterns rather than understanding, and use fictional test tables to see how unrepresentative training data produces biased results. They trace how a library recommender picks books from other borrowers' choices, then apply privacy, transparency, human review and disclosure to real-feeling decisions.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 7
Learners prepare to make digital work with and for other people. They organize accessibility around four principles (perceivable, operable, understandable, robust) and choose captions, transcripts, audio description and keyboard access for real needs. They learn what copyright protects, what the public domain is, how Creative Commons licenses work and how to write a complete attribution. Finally they practise team roles, comments versus suggestions, version history and useful feedback.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 7
In this project course, learners take a real-feeling client brief from the Cedar Valley Community Garden through the whole design process: understanding the users, defining the problem, writing testable requirements, choosing an idea, sketching a wireframe and user flow, testing with users and improving the design, and finally presenting it with evidence, honest limitations and next steps. The course ends with a teacher-reviewed presentation plan.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8
Learners follow a request from an app down through the operating system, drivers and firmware to the hardware, then look inside the operating system at the jobs it does all the time. They model an embedded system as sensors, a controller and actuators running a sense-decide-act loop, and finish by designing a fictional school greenhouse controller and weighing how often it should take readings against how long its battery lasts.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8
Learners separate the two meanings of a 'fast' connection (bandwidth and latency), convert between bits and bytes to work out realistic download and upload times, and compare wired and wireless connections. They then examine what public Wi-Fi exposes and what HTTPS does and does not protect, and finish by applying least privilege to app permissions and location sharing in a fictional family decision.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8
Using the Cedar Valley Library's fictional Ledgerly database, learners describe tables as records and fields, choose data types, and pick primary keys that stay unique and stable. They see how one big table repeats data and causes update problems, split it into two linked tables, and then read plain-language queries that filter, sort and count to predict exactly what the database will return.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8
Learners summarise data with the mean, median and mode and see how one outlier can drag the mean. They then take apart misleading charts from fictional Cedar Valley posts and newsletters: truncated axes, cherry-picked time ranges, pictures scaled in two directions, percentages without counts and dual axes. They separate correlation from causation and finish by redesigning a misleading chart and justifying every change.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8
Learners check a fictional plant-disease app's predictions against an expert and discover that a high confidence score is not the same as being right. They count false positives and false negatives in a school spam filter and weigh which error costs more, examine how people over-trust automated suggestions, and design human review with real appeals. Finally they compare error rates across groups and decide when to rely on, check or reject an AI suggestion based on the stakes.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8
Learners follow Aisha, a Cedar Valley student, from a research question to a published article on the school's fictional Valley Voices website. They plan and refine searches with key concepts and synonyms, take notes and tell quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing apart from plagiarism and patchwriting, and build citations from their elements. Finally they choose a license for their own work and check a post for audience, permanence, other people's privacy and alt text before publishing.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8
Learners help improve RoomWise, the Cedar Valley Library's fictional study-room booking app. They describe users with personas and scenarios, find problems using four usability principles, plan and run a simple usability test with realistic tasks and think-aloud, and count task success. They finish with quick accessibility checks (keyboard only, 200% zoom, captions) and decide which fixes come first.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8
In this capstone, learners analyse ValleyConnect, Cedar Valley's fictional plan to move bus passes, library cards and permits into one app. They classify its impacts as beneficial or harmful and intended or unintended, map the people it affects, examine who is left behind by the digital divide and what it costs the environment, and weigh community norms, free expression and the gap between legal and ethical. They finish by writing an evidence-based impact analysis of a school tablet program with recommendations.
