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C'est la Z

CS Certification summer intensive - the home strecth

We've a week to go in the summer intensive part of our CS teacher certification program so after an intense few weeks, I can start to breath a little. There's still a lot to be done but I feel like I can breath.

The first three and a half weeks covered programming and data structures with a bunch of pedagogy mixed in. This meant a lot of day to day adjustment of what we were teaching and how we were teaching it, after all, this is the first time a program like this has ever existed let alone shifted from in person to remote. Now we've moved in to the last course - Topics, combined with yet more pedagogy. This is the easy part. Each cohort member selected some area of computer science that is both new to them and not covered in a typical K12 CS class. We provided some ideas but they were free to come up with their own. They're spending time learning about the topic and designing a lesson or unit around it. The deliverable is a unit plan with resources and guidance on preferred pedagogy techniques and a code implementation of the topic. The idea is that in addition to showing their own expertise that other cohort members can use the project as a resource for their own classes at some future date.

The next few days consist of us supporting their work while mixing in a few lessons on topics that they didn't select. Much easier than the first few weeks.

Looking forward to some cool presentations - Blockchain, public key encryption, some machine learning and more.

Really happy about how this has all played out.

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