I have been asked by a local private school to help come up with a computer curriculum for their students grade 9-12. (ages 14 -18)
The school wants to make sure that every student graduates with enough computer knowledge for College/Work. The kids come into the school with a wide variety of backgrounds. Some have no typing skills and minimal interactions with any software other at all other than Word, while others have can touch type, have worked with Photoshop, and sometimes even some basic web editing.<p>Here are my current thoughts:
9th Grade: Touch Typing, Internet research(for you own problems), Basic computer concepts, what is an OS, what are the different hardware parts. What do different computer specs mean. How to purchase a computer<p>10th Grade: Word, Publisher (more importantly I think, Word vs. Publisher), Excel, and Access (again excel vs. Access),
(I use the Microsoft Office names, but I probably will make a point of not using the Microsoft version of these products.)<p>11th Grade: How the internet works, maybe basic html/css<p>12th Grade: Light programming, maybe javascript, possibly using codeacademy or codehs.com<p>These are minimum for each grades, not what the students who want to learn more will be offered.<p>I would really appreciate some input from the HN community.
More context might be needed here.<p>Where I live kids are interacting with computer way before they get to High School. I mean, five year olds are using computers and the Internet. To wait until HS to introduce some of these topics seems wrong. For example, all the local middle schools have some sort of a Lego Mindstorms class (some good, some bad, but they do have them).