🔮General Course Information
Course Purpose/Goals
The High School Capstone course is intended for students with 2+ years of computer science as a way to develop a portfolio of work prior to graduation.
Working under the assumption that all students are coming in with significant prior knowledge, the course has little to no direct instruction beyond Unit 0 and optional small-group teachers. Rather, it relies on students utilizing their prior knowledge and conceptual understanding to guide their own learning and develop the soft skills necessary to see a project from ideation through completion.
To aid in this, the curriculum sets forth a number of protocols that allow teachers to act as facilitators while students direct their own learning and project creation.
Assumed Prior Experience/Knowledge
This course assumes students have 2+ years experience working with a text-based coding language. From those two plus years, students should have enter the course understanding:
Procedural programming and/ or object oriented programming
Control flow
Variables and data structures
Design process
Testing/debugging strategies
Students who do not come in with prior experience may be unable to engage in the self-directed nature of the course, as they will likely require a higher amount of direct instruction or self-learning, which may take time away from the creation of their portfolio projects.
At this time, there are not plans included in this curriculum to catch up students who lack this experience; it is advised that they take introductory or intermediate coursework before engaging in the capstone.
Suggested Implementation
This is a year-long computer science course ideally executed for students in grades 11-12. Ideally, it would come after 2+ years of computer science and programming experience, such as an introductory and intermediate course, or an introductory and advanced placement course.
To ensure students are able to find success in this class, we recommend meeting for a minimum of ~225 minutes/week, the equivalent of five 45 minute class periods.
Course Platform(s) and Language
This course is language-agnostic and can be completed in any language.
For work environment, we recommend any of the following, as best fits the needs of your students:
A local IDE, such as Visual Studio or similar
This may require special permissions from your school admin to ensure proper computer installation
Students will need access to the computer terminal if working with git, as introduced in Unit 0.
Through-line Standards
As the capstone is a showcase of all prior learning, it will reinforce the NYS 9-12 Computing Standards in the Computational Thinking Domain as well as many of the Digital Fluency standards by proxy. Students may touch on standards from other domains depending on the self-selected nature of their projects.
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