Curriculum Model

Overview

Bold Idea's curriculum model is based on the concept of "Scaffolding". In education, scaffolding is a process through which a more competent peer helps a student in their Zone of Proximal Development as necessary, and tapers off this aid as it becomes unnecessary.

Our curriculum implements scaffolding in three categories of activities:

Introductory Activities (high scaffolding)
Challenge Project(s) (medium scaffolding)
Creative Project (low scaffolding)

Introductory Activities

Students are introduced to new concepts using short activities that introduce or reinforce new concepts. These activities can include puzzles, small coding challenges, exploration, or "unplugged" activities. A wide variety of activities is encouraged in order to engage students with different learning styles.

Examples

App Lab

In our App Lab course, we do an "intro project" over the first two sessions to introduce some basic CS concepts:

Get familiar with the robot turtle in app lab and learn to use algorithms to make basic shapes like squares and triangles
Learn how functions act like "blueprints", and create a function to build a house using the square a triangle
Use loops combined with the function to create a neighborhood of houses
Use parameters to change certain aspects of each house

Web Dev 1

In our Web Dev 1 course, we do a variety of activities over the first two sessions to introduce HTML:

Exploration of existing websites using "inspect element"
A hands-on activity using nesting boxes to show how to "nest" HTML elements using opening and closing tags
An "about my partner" worksheet to fill out a basic HTML template
Introducing students to the Cloud9 workspace and reproducing the worksheet content in real HTML code to see the result

Challenge Project

A challenge project (previously known as the "guided project") allows the student to apply previously learned concepts in a broader scope. The project should allow students to solve a prescribed problem while reinforcing these concepts. Because the problem is prescriptive, it is expected that all students will arrive at a similar solution.

It is crucial that during this point that mentors do not simply give students the answer to the problem. Mentors should instead help students in asking "the right questions" to help them solve the problem on their own.

For example, in the App Lab course, students are challenged over 4 sessions to create a Quiz App with the following requirements:

Show a start screen
Show 5 or more questions (one question per screen), each with multiple choice answers
Show the total number of correctly answered questions at the end
On the last screen, have a "Play Again" button that allows the user to play the game again.
Intermediate : At the end of the quiz, show 3 different messages based on how well the user did.
Advanced : Make a leaderboard

As you can see, each requirement is intentionally designed such that a student cannot solve it without knowledge of a certain concept. For example, you can't show a score without an understanding of variables. You can't show the 3 different messages w/o knowing something about conditions or if-statements.

Multiple levels

The challenge project should also give more advanced students the opportunity to challenge themselves beyond the minimum requirements. In the above example, there are additional challenges for intermediate and advanced learners.

Considerations

The following are some points to consider when designing a challenge project:

How can you frame the project as a challenge or solvable problem?
What are the objectives of the challenge (project requirements)?
What skills/concepts should this project reinforce?
Could students find ways to meet the project requirements without applying these skills/concepts? You might need to fine-tune the challenge so that students don't find an "easy way out".

Creative Project

The creative project allows students to apply what they've learned with more room for creative expression. Students are encouraged to go through a "design thinking" process over multiple sessions where they ideate, plan, prototype, gather feedback, and iterate.

Students will have the opportunity to demo their creative projects at Demo Day.