Making with Code

Making with Code is a set of free, open-source computer science courses and related curriculum exploring a new, old approach to teaching computer science based in Constructionism. It’s new because it draws on the tools of modern computational practice and is grounded in youths’ digital worlds. It is old because technologists have been dreaming of an empowering, transformative integration of education and technology for over half a century.

You can read more about the theoretical underpinnings of the course in our paper, Recovering Constructionism in computer science: Design of a ninth-grade introductory computer science course.

The content is structured as a set of modular components which can be flexibly composed to meet the needs and priorities of different contexts. Making with Code was developed as a curriculum for a ninth- and tenth- grade sequence preceding IB Computer Science. This spring 2022 pilot adapts the curriculum to support three different audiences:

• Graduate students interested in using computational methods for research in the learning sciences
• Preservice CS teachers developing CS pedagogical content knowledge.
• Teachers certified in another area, learning CS content and CS pedagogical content knowledge at the same time.