Curriculum Overview¶
Eastwind Christian Academy · Friday Coding & AI · Grades 5–10 · 2026–27
What this is¶
A full-year computer science and AI literacy course for a 45-minute Friday resource class. One room, grades 5 through 10, roughly 13–20 students, 34 teaching sessions from August 14, 2026 to May 21, 2027.
No homework. Nothing to turn in, nothing graded. Each week ends with one optional Think About This question — something to notice during the week.
The four constraints that shaped everything¶
1. Five grade levels in one room. Every design decision serves this. Same activity, three depths, cross-age pairs, and a code editor that shows the same project as blocks or as real JavaScript so an 11-year-old and a 16-year-old can sit side by side without either feeling out of place. See the teaching playbook.
2. Forty-five minutes, once a week. Seven days is a long gap. The answer is multi-week projects students own, plus a fixed weekly rhythm and explicit callback rituals, rather than 34 disconnected activities.
3. No homework. Everything happens in the room. Nothing can depend on work done at home — which means the Think About This prompts have to earn attention on curiosity alone.
4. Most of these students already did code.org last year. A repeat loses them in ten minutes. This year is deliberately different: a new platform, a real AI strand, text-based Python, and — the part that actually lands — a live website on the public internet with their name on it.
The year¶
🎮 Unit 1 — Think Like a Machine¶
Weeks 1–8 · Aug 14 – Oct 2 Computational thinking through game building in MakeCode Arcade. No accounts needed.
🤖 Unit 2 — AI Unmasked¶
Weeks 9–17 · Oct 16 – Dec 18 What AI actually is, how it learns, and where it fails. Students train their own model.
⌨️ Unit 3 — From Blocks to Text¶
Weeks 18–26 · Jan 8 – Mar 5 Real Python, typed by hand. Plus how to work with an AI assistant and check its work.
🚀 Unit 4 — Ship It¶
Weeks 27–34 · Mar 19 – May 21 HTML, CSS, and a real deployment to Azure. Every student gets a public URL.
📅 Full dated calendar: Scope & Sequence
Why this order¶
Build first, then question, then build deeper, then ship.
- Unit 1 opens with a win. Students make a working game in the first 25 minutes of the first day. Nothing builds buy-in like something that runs.
- Unit 2 arrives when it should. Around late October the novelty of game-building starts to thin and the days get shorter. Switching to discussion, experiment, and argument is a change of mode, not a drop in energy — and by then students have enough programming context for "how does a model learn?" to mean something.
- Unit 3 has a reason to exist. Text-based Python is a hard sell on its own. After Unit 2, students want to know how the thing they've been arguing about is actually built. The motivation is already in the room.
- Unit 4 pays off the promise. On Day 1 they're told: "By May, every one of you will have something you built live on the internet." Unit 4 delivers it, and the whole year points at it.
What students leave with¶
By the end of May, a student who attended most Fridays can:
- Explain how a computer stores information, and count in binary
- Build a working game with loops, variables, conditionals, and collision detection
- Explain what an AI model is actually doing — and why "it learned from data" has real consequences
- Train a machine learning classifier and deliberately break it to expose bias
- Read and write basic Python, and read an error message on purpose
- Evaluate AI-generated code instead of trusting it
- Build a web page and deploy it to a real public URL
And, more importantly: a working intuition that computers are understandable. Not magic, not scary — just very fast, very literal machines that do exactly what someone told them to.
What this deliberately isn't¶
| Not this | Because |
|---|---|
| A code.org rerun | Most students did that last year |
| A single-platform course | Different tools serve different ages and units |
| Graded or homework-driven | It's a resource class; engagement is the only lever |
| An AP CS prep course | Wrong audience — 5th graders are in the room |
| Faith-integrated | The teacher chose a secular, technical focus |
| Dependent on purchased hardware | Everything is free. micro:bit is noted as optional enrichment only |
Design principles¶
- Same activity, different depth. Never split the room into different tasks.
- Never a blank page. Younger students always get working code to modify.
- Every lesson has an unplugged Plan B. Wi-Fi failure should never cost a session.
- Broken is interesting. Share the instructive failure, not the polished success.
- Multi-week projects beat one-off activities. Ownership survives the seven-day gap.
- The teacher never takes the mouse. Ask questions instead.
- Front-load the payoff, then earn it. Promise the live website on Day 1.
How to use these materials¶
| You want to… | Go to |
|---|---|
| Teach this Friday | The week's lesson page — it's written to be taught cold |
| Print handouts | Handouts, or run npm run pdf |
| Know what's coming | Scope & Sequence |
| Handle the age span | Teaching Playbook |
| Survive a Wi-Fi outage | Unplugged Backups |
| Get sites unblocked | IT Whitelist Request |
| Show standards alignment | Standards Map |
| Set up a tool | Platforms & Setup |
Every lesson page is self-contained. Open it, skim the run sheet, print the handout, teach. There is no need to have read anything else first.
A note on flexibility¶
The calendar assumes standard holidays and includes three flex weeks specifically so that a snow day or a surprise assembly doesn't cascade through the year.
Lessons are modular. If a week vanishes, spend a flex week rather than renumbering. The scope & sequence lists what to cut first if you fall behind — and what to never cut.