Curriculum

We have a wide ranging curriculum with lots of hand-on opportunities. We focus on the Archdiocesan goals of learning how to operate and use computers in everyday life (while maintaining Archdiocesan and national standards), with a view towards growing our critical thinking and creative abilities. Across the different ages students will meet many different challenges and will learn how computers impact every area of our lives and control more than we think. Several of the many things we will do are briefly explored below.

Programming Robots

Students got to program Sphero Bolt robots to run a course. After practicing for a while on a few small "test tracks", the students worked in teams to program their bots to run a longer track. The team who got theirs the farthest down the course in the least amount of time won bragging rights. It was a good example of taking the programming we learn on the screen and applying it to a real world puzzle.

Telling Stories Through Code

Second grade is animating short stories using the Scratch block coding platform from M. I. T. We have been looking at the very basics of thinking logically and putting the proper computer instructions in the proper order to achieve the desired outcome. They are taking those skills they have built solving puzzles and using them to have characters in a program act out the story they want to tell.

digital citizenship

We live in an increasingly online world in which we seem tied to electronic devices. Being always available, and having the ability to always be online, comes with it's own set of challenges, stresses, and even dangers. We look at these issues each year to be reminded of the importance of staying safe and healthy online, including:

maintaining balance in the activities we choose,
paying attention to what we learn and looking at things online with caution and necessary skepticism,
keeping any information which can be used to identify us private and not available online,
and remembering that anything posted online is permanent and we cannot assume it is gone even if we think we deleted it.

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