Search every subject world, from Preschool to Grade 12. The first five courses of every subject path are free.
129 courses
Computers & Digital Literacy · Preschool
Children find out what a device with a screen is, learn gentle and safe ways to use one (dry hands, sitting down, drinks kept away, soft taps), and practise using a device together with a grown-up while taking turns. Each lesson is a few minutes long and ends with something to do or talk about away from the screen.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Preschool
Children practise the three touch-screen moves they need most: one gentle tap followed by waiting, dragging with press-slide-lift, and listening to a direction before pointing and choosing. Pretend play away from the screen backs up each move.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Preschool
Children learn the three buttons that control a story video or audio story: play, pause and replay. They practise pausing to talk or take care of something, replaying a part they missed, and keeping sound at a just-right level by asking a grown-up to turn it down.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Preschool
Using Paint Pad, a pretend drawing app, children learn what three drawing tools do (crayon, paint bucket and stamp), make a picture where every tap adds something, fix a mistake with the undo button instead of throwing the picture away, and give their finished picture a name that tells what it shows.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Preschool
Children learn that pressing save keeps a creation so it can be found later, and that work closed without saving can be lost. They recognise saved work by its small picture and name in a gallery, find their own creation among others, and make a real art box to practise keeping and finding things.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Preschool
Children name the trusted grown-ups who help them with devices, practise 'stop and tell' when a screen shows something scary or confusing or asks them to buy, chat or type, and learn to notice tired eyes or a wiggly body and take a break away from the screen.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Pre-K
Children meet three input tools (a finger on a touch screen, a mouse and a keyboard), learn to point and click with a mouse that slides on the table, and use a pretend keyboard to copy short words and make a gap with the space bar. A paper keyboard lets them practise away from the screen.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Pre-K
Children learn that icons are small pictures that stand for an app or a job, match common icons to what they do, and move around a pretend tablet with the home, back and close buttons. They finish by finding the right button in an app they have never seen, and by knowing which buttons are for grown-ups.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Pre-K
In Shape Studio, a pretend app, children build pictures from circles, squares, rectangles and triangles. They learn to select a shape and then change its colour, size or place by dragging, and they plan a picture by choosing its shapes first. Cutting real paper shapes connects the screen to hands-on making.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Pre-K
Children save their work and check the 'Saved' message to make sure it worked, reopen saved work from the gallery to keep going, and learn helpful words for asking a grown-up for help: what I was doing, and what happened. Practice is with pretend apps and talk, not real accounts.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Pre-K
Children sort information into private (home address, phone number, passwords, photos of themselves) and fine to share (favourite colour or animal), practise stopping to ask a trusted grown-up before typing or saying private information on a device, and learn that a password is a secret key shared only with the family grown-ups who look after them. No real personal information is ever asked for.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Pre-K
Children think about what is best done hands-on (smelling, squishing, building, running) and what a device can help with (seeing faraway things, calling family), use a timer and a warning to end device time calmly, and make the same idea two ways, on a screen and with real materials, then say what was different.
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 · Kindergarten
Children learn that hardware is the parts of a device you can touch, recognise the screen, keyboard, mouse or trackpad, speaker, microphone, camera and charger, and say what each part does. They then find the same jobs done by different-looking parts on a desktop computer, a laptop and a tablet.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Kindergarten
Children build a toolkit of input moves: mouse point, click, double-click and drag; touch tap, press-and-hold, swipe, spread and pinch; and the keyboard's letter keys, space bar, backspace and enter. They finish by choosing the best input tool for different jobs.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Kindergarten
In Sticker Town, a pretend app, children learn to open the menu (three lines) to find places that are not on the screen, find tools in a toolbar by their icons and names, and scroll to find things below or above what they can see. They use home, back and close to get around without getting lost.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Kindergarten
Children make a sticker picture in Sticker Town and add a typed caption that tells about it, save it with a name that says what it is, and then reopen it, change it and save again so the change is kept. They learn why names like 'aaaa' make work hard to find.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Kindergarten
Children learn what a digital message is and that a sent message cannot be taken back, message only people their grown-ups say are OK, keep private information out of messages, and tell a trusted adult when a message asks for private things or feels unkind or uncomfortable. They practise writing kind messages and the 'face to face' test before sending.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Kindergarten
Children learn to describe a device problem clearly (what I was doing, what I expected, what happened), try simple safe checks with a grown-up (power, volume, plugged in, wait and try again), and recognise problems where they must stop and get an adult straight away, such as a cracked screen, a hot device or a spilled drink.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 1
Learners discover that a computing system is hardware (the parts you can touch) working with software (the instructions that tell the hardware what to do). They meet two hidden parts, the processor and storage, and then find tiny computers inside everyday things such as microwaves, traffic lights and toys.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 1
Learners learn what the main keyboard keys do (letters, numbers, space bar, backspace, enter and shift for capitals), put their hands on the home row by feeling for the bumps on F and J, and practise pointer skills: click, double-click, drag-and-drop and selecting words by dragging across them.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 1
Using Story Writer, a pretend writing app, learners type sentences that start with a capital letter, have one space between words and end with a period, make a page clear with a big bold title and a captioned picture, and use a plan-make-check-fix routine to find and fix mistakes before sharing.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 1
Learners find out that a file is one saved piece of work with a name, made with an app and kept in storage. They practise choosing file names that tell what is inside, group files into folders like papers in drawers, and find a file by opening the right folder or searching for its name.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 1
Learners use a traffic-light model to decide what to do online: go ahead with approved apps, slow down and ask before downloading or tapping pop-ups, and stop and tell when something is scary, asks for private information or wants money. They spot private information in messages, keep passwords with a parent or carer, ask before sharing photos of others, and practise kind responses to unkind messages.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 1
Learners find and extend repeating patterns and see that computers use patterns to repeat things. They collect data by sorting and counting objects carefully, record it in a table, and read picture and bar graphs to find the most, the least and how many more, finishing with a graph about getting to school.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 2
Learners sort parts into inputs (that send information into a computer) and outputs (that show or play information for people), discover that a touch screen is both, learn that a program is a list of instructions written by people and followed exactly, and use the input-processing-output model to explain everyday devices such as a calculator and a store scanner.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 2
Learners practise accuracy before speed with home-row hands, type sentences with capitals (shift with the opposite hand), single spaces and end marks, and learn to edit like a writer: moving the cursor with arrow keys or a click, telling backspace from delete, and selecting a word to replace it.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 2
Learners organise files in folders inside folders and read file paths such as School / Science / plant photo. They retrieve files three ways (opening folders along the path, searching, and sorting a list by name or date), then rename, move and delete files carefully, learning what the trash does and why emptying it is final.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 2
Using Slide Maker, a pretend presentation app, learners find out that a presentation is a set of slides shown in order, each with one main idea. They design clear slides (short title, few words, a picture that fits, big text, strong contrast), put slides in order from title to ending, and practise presenting by talking to the audience instead of reading every word.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 2
Learners ask a data question with clear choices, collect answers with tally marks and count them into a table, then type the table into Grid Sheet, a pretend app that draws a bar graph from it. They check that a graph has a title, labels and a scale, and answer questions from tables and graphs: most, least, how many more and how many in all.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 2
Learners discover that a network is devices connected by cables or invisible wireless signals so they can share information. They follow a photo as it is split into small pieces, passed from router to router across the internet and put back together, then sort what needs a network connection and what still works without one.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 2
Learners tell private information from things that are fine to share, discover that posts leave a digital footprint that others can copy, and practise a four-question check before posting (true, kind, mine to share, safe), including asking permission for photos of others. They then learn what makes a password strong, keep it secret and log out of shared devices. Only made-up passwords are used.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 2
Learners become careful problem-solvers: they describe a device problem precisely (including the exact message on screen), try fixes in a sensible order (simplest first, one change at a time, test after each), keep a short log of what they tried, and know when to stop and ask an adult.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 3
Learners model a computing system as hardware, software, data and people working together, tell memory (a desk for work in progress) from storage (a filing cabinet that keeps files), and tell the operating system from apps. They then troubleshoot like technicians: describe the symptom, guess a likely cause, test one fix, and check the result.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 3
Learners set up a healthy typing posture, learn which finger types each letter key (finger zones), practise reaching from the home row and returning, and measure accuracy by counting correct and incorrect letters. They finish by writing a realistic practice plan that puts accuracy before speed.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 3
Learners structure documents with a title, headings, paragraphs and the right kind of list, format for readability (size, contrast, consistency and bold used sparingly), edit efficiently with select, cut, copy, paste and undo, and proofread for the mistakes spell-check cannot catch.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 3
Learners turn a research question into strong keywords, start from curated sources (a teacher's link list, the school library database, a kids' encyclopedia) and explain why, skim an original article about monarch butterflies for the sentences that answer their question, and take notes in their own words with a record of where each fact came from.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 3
Learners read and build tables (rows, columns, headers, cells), collect their own data by running a simplified ramp simulation and recording each trial, show results in a bar chart that fits the question, and check data quality by spotting missing values, typing mistakes, duplicates and impossible values before trusting a chart.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 3
Learners follow an email from a device through routers and the internet to a mail server, where it waits until the receiver's device collects it. They choose the right tool and tone for a purpose and audience, learn the parts of an email, practise responsible habits (think before sending, ask before forwarding, report worrying messages), and write a clear, kind email of their own.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 3
Learners decide which permissions (camera, microphone, location, contacts, photos) an app really needs and why to ask a grown-up first, spot details in photos that reveal where someone is, and learn that creators own their work: we ask permission or use free-to-use works, and give credit with the title, creator and source.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 3
Learners plan a short digital report for an audience (title, introduction, sections with headings, conclusion), then make it accessible: heading styles, useful alt text for images, readable size and contrast, meaning that doesn't depend on colour alone, descriptive link text and captions. They finish by checking a draft against an accessibility checklist and revising a section.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 4
Learners classify hardware, system software and application software and explain why updates matter, compare storage sizes from bytes to terabytes (each unit about 1,000 times the one before) and estimate how many files fit, compare storage on a device with cloud storage on servers, and plan backups so an important file always exists in two places.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 4
Learners extend touch-typing to punctuation: which finger types the comma, period, apostrophe, question mark and exclamation mark, and why shift is held with the opposite hand. They apply typed spacing rules (no space before end marks and commas, one space after), use apostrophes correctly, and measure accuracy 'out of 100' to choose targeted practice.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 4
Learners choose the format that fits a purpose and audience (document, slides, poster, audio or video), design slides that support a speaker rather than replace one, plan a presentation with a storyboard, and add multimedia responsibly: credited images with alt text, video with captions, and sensible file sizes.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 4
Using Grid Sheet, a pretend spreadsheet, learners name cells by column letter and row number, read and write formulas that start with = (such as `=B2*C2`), add a range with `=SUM(D2:D4)`, and see that formulas recalculate automatically when data changes, solving a class bake-sale problem along the way.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 4
Learners search the open web more skilfully (specific keywords, refining a search, spotting sponsored results), verify what they find by asking who made it, why, when and with what evidence, confirm claims in two other reliable sources (and catch a popular myth), and cite their sources with author, title, website, date and address.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 4
Learners think about digital identity (what posts, likes and shares say about them) and choose usernames that reveal nothing private, protect accounts with long, unique passphrases and logging out, spot the warning signs of scam and phishing messages, and respond to cyberbullying as an upstander: don't retaliate, save evidence, get an adult to help block and report, and support the person targeted.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 4
Learners discover that computers store everything (numbers, letters and pictures) as bits, 0s and 1s, and that every extra bit doubles the number of patterns. They turn number codes into pixel pictures, then use a simple plant-growth simulation to make predictions and explain what any model leaves out.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 4
Learners follow a design cycle to make a digital resource for real users: they find out what a group of Kindergarten learners needs (a guide to caring for the class tablets) by asking good questions, write a design goal, sketch a quick prototype that fits young readers and is accessible, test it, sort helpful feedback from unhelpful feedback, and improve the design.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 5
Learners trace data through a computer system (input, processor working with memory, storage, output, all managed by the operating system), compare devices' processor, memory, storage and battery for different tasks, and explain bigger systems: embedded computers that use sensors and actuators, and clients that request information from servers.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 5
Learners measure typing fluency in words per minute and correct words per minute, set goals that keep accuracy high, edit efficiently with cut, copy, paste, undo, redo and find-and-replace (and avoid its classic traps), and proofread systematically, judging spelling and grammar suggestions instead of accepting them blindly.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 5
Using Grid Sheet, a pretend spreadsheet, learners summarise data with SUM, AVERAGE, MIN and MAX, fill a formula down a column and predict how its cell references shift, sort and filter rows without breaking them apart, and choose and read the right chart (bar, line or pie) for a question, finishing by describing what a chart shows.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 5
Learners judge sources like fact-checkers: they identify a source's purpose (inform, persuade, sell, entertain), separate facts from opinions, tell primary from secondary sources, and use lateral reading (leaving a page to see who is behind it and what other reliable sources say), including checking photos that may be edited or used out of context.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 5
Learners follow data across the internet (packets with IP addresses, routers choosing paths, and DNS turning names into addresses), use a simple shift cipher to understand encryption and what the padlock in a browser really means, and build a personal security toolkit: unique passphrases, a password manager with a trusted adult, two-step verification, updates and care on public Wi-Fi.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 5
Learners find out that creators automatically own their original work (copyright), that using it needs permission or a licence unless it is in the public domain, how to read simple open-licence conditions and write a full attribution, how to remix responsibly, and how photos and videos can be edited to persuade.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 5
Learners meet artificial intelligence as programs that learn patterns from many examples rather than thinking like people. They follow how a pretend fruit sorter is trained and tested, use a sampling simulation to see why small or unrepresentative data gives poor results, and practise responsible use: checking AI answers, keeping private information out, keeping humans in charge, and saying when AI helped.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 5
Learners plan and build a digital research portfolio: a focused question, a tidy folder structure, file names that sort by date and track versions, a source list of evaluated sources with full citations (including any AI help), notes in their own words, an accessible final presentation, and a reflection backed by evidence from their own process.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 6
Learners describe any computing device, from a laptop to a thermostat, with the input-processing-output-storage model, compare device types by their tradeoffs, and turn a person's needs into checkable requirements. They meet the accessibility features built into most devices and finish by choosing and justifying a device for a new user in an unfamiliar setting.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 6
Learners read and build file paths, name files so they sort correctly, and learn what a file extension and a shortcut really are. They plan backups with the 3-2-1 idea and version history, find out why a synced folder is not a backup, and practice a step-by-step troubleshooting routine that ends with a clear request for help.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 6
Learners follow data from a tablet in the Cedar Valley Library to a web server across the internet. They learn that the internet is a network of networks joined by routers, that data travels as numbered packets that can take different routes, that DNS turns names into IP addresses, and that agreed rules called protocols are organized in a simple four-layer model, explained with a postal analogy.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 6
Learners discover how a computer stores everything with bits: why n bits give 2^n^ patterns, how 8-bit binary numbers work with place values from 128 down to 1, how text becomes numbers through a code table such as ASCII (with Unicode covering the world's writing systems), and how images become grids of pixels whose size depends on resolution and bits per pixel.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 6
Learners work in a fictional spreadsheet program with a library reading challenge, a community-garden harvest log and bike-share ride counts. They write formulas with cell references, use SUM, AVERAGE, MIN and MAX on ranges, predict how formulas change when filled down, sort and filter to answer questions, and choose the chart that fits the question: bar, line, pie or scatter.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 6
Learners protect their accounts with long passphrases, unique passwords and multi-factor authentication, decide what personal information to keep private and how a digital footprint forms, and practice spotting the warning signs of scam messages and unsafe downloads. The course ends with respectful communication, a clear plan for responding to cyberbullying and asking for consent before posting about others.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 6
Learners check sources by author, purpose, date and evidence, read laterally to see what independent sources say, and separate facts from opinions. They investigate photos shared out of context, then look inside AI text and image generators: tools that predict likely output from patterns in their training data. Learners practice verifying AI output claim by claim and disclosing honestly how they used it.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 6
In this project course, learners plan and make a short research product, such as a one-page web guide, poster or slide set, that everyone in its audience can use. They write a focused research question, take notes with citations, and design with real headings, meaningful alt text, strong contrast without relying on color, plain language and descriptive links. They check their work with a checklist, give and use peer feedback, and write a statement that explains their design choices.
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.
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 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
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 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 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
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 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 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 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
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 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
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 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
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 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 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 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.
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.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11
Before trusting any number, learners examine how its data were collected. They separate populations, sampling frames and samples, compare random, stratified, convenience and voluntary-response sampling, diagnose sampling, nonresponse and measurement bias in fictional Cedar Valley studies, use a sampling simulation to separate random variability from bias, and ask who is missing from app logs and sensor data and what informed consent requires.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11
Learners migrate a messy shared spreadsheet, the Cedar Valley Community Garden's volunteer sheet, into a relational design step by step. They find the entities hidden in a flat sheet and the anomalies its repeated facts cause, choose stable primary keys, make values atomic, split tables so each fact is stored once, link them with foreign keys, compare spreadsheet lookups with database joins, check referential integrity while loading, and document the result in a data dictionary.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11
Learners answer real questions from Cedar Valley Bike Share's trip data by predicting exactly what SQL-like queries return: filters that combine AND, OR and NOT with parentheses, aggregates with COUNT, SUM, AVG and GROUP BY, and inner joins that silently drop unmatched rows. They then turn a result into communication: choosing a visualization that fits the result's shape and writing a precise headline with annotation, honest axes and caveats.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11
Learners act as the volunteer IT team for the fictional Cedar Valley Public Library. They split a flat network into guest, staff, device and server segments, apply toy firewall rule tables where the first matching rule wins and everything else is denied, read fictional sign-in logs for warning signs such as bursts of failed logins, and harden systems through secure configuration, patch management, least privilege and the zero-trust idea. Everything is defensive: recognizing, preventing, detecting and responding.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11
A vendor says its leak-detection model for Cedar Valley's water meters is '97% accurate'. Learners find out what that does and does not mean. They build confusion matrices, compute accuracy, precision and recall with the real formulas, see how rare positives make accuracy misleading, trace how a decision threshold trades false positives for false negatives, choose metrics by the cost of each error, and evaluate fairly with separate test data and subgroup results.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11
Learners review the design of Spokewise, the fictional Cedar Valley bike share's new app, and a student team's study-timer app. They apply privacy by design (data minimization, purpose limitation, retention limits, protective defaults and meaningful consent), recognize and redesign deceptive design patterns, distinguish copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets, compare permissive and copyleft open-source licenses as concepts, and reason through design decisions with stakeholders, consequences and rights. All legal content is general information, not legal advice.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11
This advanced course follows the Cedar Valley Library's design team as it tests and repairs its new study-room booking page. Learners compute usability metrics (task success rate, time on task, error rate and post-task ease ratings), plan an ethical, inclusive test with disabled participants, informed consent and non-leading tasks, audit accessibility through the keyboard path, accessible names, contrast ratios, captions and reflow, and then prioritize findings by severity and frequency before retesting.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 11
In this project course, a student team investigates why Cedar Valley High's Wi-Fi slows to a crawl at lunch. Learners turn a complaint into a testable question with competing hypotheses, choose data sources (access-point logs, latency measurements, link usage, a survey, a schedule) with permission and privacy safeguards, analyze fair comparisons across time, place and days, write claim–evidence–reasoning statements that match the strength of the evidence, name confounders and limitations, and write a full investigation report with evidence-based recommendations.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 12
Learners turn a vague idea into a plan they could defend to a sponsor: a problem statement backed by evidence, a stakeholder map, an explicit scope, measurable goals and deliverables, a dependency-ordered schedule with a critical path and buffer, and a scored risk register with mitigations. One fictional project, a loan catalog for a community tool library, is planned end to end, and new projects in every lesson and the quiz check transfer.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 12
Learners turn a project plan into a specification others can build and test against: functional and non-functional requirements worded so they can be verified, user stories with Given/When/Then acceptance criteria, a data inventory that justifies every field and its retention, meaningful consent and a light privacy impact assessment, and accessibility requirements that each name a verification method. The tool-library catalog from course 1 is the running example.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 12
Learners judge tools and information the way a careful consultant would. They evaluate software against requirements, privacy terms, update support, total cost of ownership and lock-in; test an AI tool on a small labeled sample and decide how much human review it needs; trace claims and datasets back to their origins with a four-move routine; and make weighted comparisons with must-have criteria and a sensitivity check. The tool library's catalog decision is the running case.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 12
A strictly defensive course on running a small project team securely. Learners redesign a team's accounts around individual logins, password managers, multi-factor sign-in and recovery that survives graduation; apply least privilege to file and link sharing with regular access reviews; protect data and devices with tested 3-2-1 backups, updates and device encryption; and talk two fictional incidents (a lost laptop and an over-shared link) through detect, contain, notify, recover and a blameless review.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 12
Learners find out why estimates from samples wobble, separate chance variation from bias, and use the approximation 'margin of error is about 1/√n' to turn a sample share into an honest interval. They compare groups with intervals and error bars, learn why 'no evidence of a difference' is not 'evidence of no difference', and rewrite headlines and charts so the precision of the words matches the precision of the data. A bike-share survey runs through the course, and a sampling simulation makes the variation visible.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 12
Learners practice the communication that surrounds every real project: emails that get a useful reply, concise messages and meeting notes with owners and dates, a portfolio case study that credits the team and reports evidence honestly, and a public professional presence that protects their privacy. They also learn to give feedback that is specific, actionable and kind, and to receive it without getting defensive. The tool-library team's sponsor emails and case study are the running examples.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 12
Learners write the documentation that lets someone else trust, check and continue their work: decision records that keep the reasons for choices (and supersede rather than rewrite them), user-facing changelogs, citations for data, software and AI assistance, limitations sections that name threats to validity and their likely effects, and the habits and README that make an analysis reproducible. Worked examples come from the tool-library and bike-share capstones.
Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 12
The capstone path ends where real projects end: in front of an audience. Learners structure a short presentation around problem, evidence and limitations, with claim-style slide titles and a time budget; plan a live demo with a script, test data, a pre-flight checklist and a recorded fallback; make slides and delivery accessible; and then review other teams with a rubric, answer questions honestly, and reflect on their own project with evidence.
