SFUSD's creative computing curriculum introduces computer science as a creative, collaborative, and engaging discipline to children in third through fifth grade. The Blue Level curriculum builds upon the foundational skills students acquired in the Green Level curriculum, and is recommended for students in grades 4 or 5. Across 4 units and 12-20 lessons, students will learn about algorithms and programming, computing systems, the Internet, and impacts of computing, while developing strong practices and dispositions. Lessons are designed to be implemented in 45 to 60-minute periods approximately once per week.

Unit Pacing
The Blue Level curriculum contains 4 units of 5 lessons, for a total of 20 lessons. To accommodate different school schedules, we offer the following accordion-style model for expanding or contracting the number of lessons in each unit so that students can experience the content in all 4 units in a 12-, 16-, or 20- session Computer Science course.

SFUSD's creative computing curriculum introduces computer science as a creative, collaborative, and engaging discipline to children in third through fifth grade. The Green Level curriculum serves as a foundational entry point for students in grades 3-5 to begin exploring computer science concepts. Across 4 units and 12-20 lessons, students will learn about algorithms and programming through programming in Scratch, while developing strong practices and dispositions. Lessons are designed to be implemented in 45 to 60-minute periods approximately once per week.

3-5 Computer Science Curriculum

K-2 Computer Science Curriculum

SFUSD's creative computing curriculum introduces computer science as a creative, collaborative, and engaging discipline to children in kindergarten through second grade. Across 3 units and 15-20 lessons, students will learn about algorithms and programming, computing systems, the Internet, and impacts of computing, while developing strong practices and dispositions. Lessons are designed to be implemented in 45 to 60-minute periods approximately once per week.

K-2 Computer Science Curriculum - Orange. SFUSD Computer Science Team-Created Lessons

ScratchJr is a developmentally appropriate programming language designed specifically for children aged five through seven by teams at Tufts University and MIT. Using the ScratchJr app, children can create their own interactive collages, animated stories, games, and other programs. In this unit, which can be further divided into two modules, students will learn a series of concepts and skills that are applied in two primary creative projects -- an interactive collage and an animated story. Through these lessons, students will learn how to express their own ideas in a way that a computer can understand. These lessons were designed to support students working individually and in pairs, with 1-2 tablets per pair.

In this unit, students apply the computational skills they practiced in Unit 1 on actual computers - Bee-Bot robots! They playfully express themselves and reinforce language arts standards as they learn to program increasingly complex sequences of simple commands. Students gain fluency with planning, testing, and debugging programs as they work with familiar characters in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, More-igami, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales. The unit crescendos to a peak when students program Bee-Bots to retell a narrative they wrote in Writing Workshop! The optimal group size is 4 students or fewer per Bee-Bot.

In the first unit, students are introduced to computer science through playful, unplugged activities. The goal is for students to combine their creativity with content, to make their learning memorable and personally meaningful. Students persist joyfully as they engage in design, hardware, and big computational thinking topics: sequencing, pattern recognition, decomposition, and algorithms.