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 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.
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 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 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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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 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
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 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
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
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.
