Standards Map — CSTA 2026¶

This course is aligned to the CSTA PK–12 Computer Science Standards (2026 revision).

Official standards: https://csteachers.org/pk12standards/

Read this before quoting standard codes

This map aligns lessons to the concept areas and grade bands of the 2026 standards. It deliberately does not list individual standard codes.

The 2026 revision is recent, and codes follow a BAND-CONCEPT-SUBCONCEPT-NN pattern (for example MS-PROG-DV-04). Rather than reproduce codes that may be misquoted, pull the exact ones you need from the official standards explorer at https://csteachers.org/pk12standards/ and paste them into the tables below when you need them for an administrator or an accreditation file.

Concept-area alignment is accurate and is sufficient for almost every purpose.

Why the 2026 standards suit this class unusually well¶

Two changes in the 2026 revision map directly onto what this course already does:

AI is integrated across all concept areas rather than sitting in a separate silo. Unit 2 isn't a detour from computer science — under these standards it is computer science.
Dispositions are named explicitly — Curiosity, Persistence, Critical Thinking, and Sense of Belonging among them. A no-homework, no-grades resource class is unusually well positioned to develop exactly these, and they are now something you can point to as intentional design rather than a nice side effect.

The framework¶

Five concept areas¶

Concept area	Short	What it covers
Algorithms & Design	ALG	Problem solving, representing and designing step-by-step processes, efficiency, correctness
Programming	PROG	Developing, organising, documenting, testing, and refining code
Data & Analysis	DATA	Collecting, preparing, analysing, and visualising data; accuracy, bias, privacy
Systems & Security	SYS	How hardware, software, and networks interact and are protected
Computing & Society	SOC	Computing's interplay with people and society; ethics, emerging tech, careers, impacts

Twelve practices, in four categories¶

Ethics & Social Responsibility
Inclusive Collaboration
Computational Thinking
Human-Centered Design

Seven dispositions¶

Creativity · Critical Thinking · Curiosity · Persistence · Reflectiveness · Resourcefulness · Sense of Belonging

Grade bands in this room¶

A single 45-minute class spanning grades 5–10 touches three bands simultaneously:

Band	Grades	Who in this class
Grade 5	5	Youngest students
Middle School	6–8	The largest group
High School (foundational)	9–12	Oldest students

This is what the tiers are actually doing

The 🟢 / 🟡 / 🔴 tiers aren't just difficulty settings — they map onto the three grade bands present in the room. A 🟢 challenge targets the Grade 5 band, 🟡 targets Middle School, 🔴 targets High School foundational. Same lesson, three bands, simultaneously. That's the honest answer if an administrator asks how one lesson serves grades 5 through 10.

Unit-level alignment¶

Unit	ALG	PROG	DATA	SYS	SOC
1 — Think Like a Machine	●●●	●●●	●●	●	○
2 — AI Unmasked	●	○	●●●	●●	●●●
3 — From Blocks to Text	●●●	●●●	●●	●	●
4 — Ship It	●●	●●●	●	●●●	●●

●●● primary focus · ●● substantial · ● touched · ○ minimal

Across the year all five concept areas get substantial coverage — which is unusual for a 45-minute weekly elective and worth stating plainly if anyone asks whether a resource class can be rigorous.

Week-by-week¶

Unit 1 — Think Like a Machine¶

Wk	Lesson	Primary	Also
1	Launch Day	DATA — binary representation	SOC, PROG
2	Sequence & events	ALG — ordered instructions	PROG
3	Loops	ALG — repetition, efficiency	PROG
4	Variables	PROG — storing and updating state	DATA
5	Conditionals	ALG — decisions and Boolean logic	PROG
6	Sprites & collisions	PROG — objects and event handling	ALG
7	Build your own	ALG — decomposition and design	PROG
8	Playtest & share	PROG — testing and refining	SOC

Unit 2 — AI Unmasked¶

Wk	Lesson	Primary	Also
9	What is AI, really?	SOC — emerging technology	DATA
10	Training data	DATA — data collection and modelling	SOC
11	Bias	DATA — accuracy and bias	SOC
12	How language models work	DATA — prediction from data	ALG
13	Prompt engineering	SOC — human-computer interaction	DATA
14	Hallucinations	SOC — evaluating computing outputs	DATA
15	Synthetic media	SOC — societal impacts, media literacy	SYS
16	AI for Good sprint	SOC — human-centered design	ALG
17	Hour of Code	PROG — student choice	ALG

Unit 3 — From Blocks to Text¶

Wk	Lesson	Primary	Also
18	Hello, Python	PROG — syntax and program structure	ALG
19	Variables & input	PROG — state and user input	DATA
20	Conditionals in text	ALG — Boolean logic	PROG
21	Loops in text	ALG — iteration	PROG
22	Lists	DATA — data structures	PROG
23	Functions	PROG — abstraction and modularity	ALG
24	Debugging	PROG — testing and refining	ALG
25	Coding with an AI assistant	SOC — evaluating AI output	PROG
26	Mini-project	PROG — independent development	ALG

Unit 4 — Ship It¶

Wk	Lesson	Primary	Also
27	Your first web page	PROG — markup and structure	SYS
28	Styling with CSS	PROG — presentation and design	SOC
29	Going live on Azure	SYS — servers, domains, deployment	SOC
30	Capstone kickoff	ALG — design and decomposition	SOC
31	Capstone build 1	PROG — iterative development	ALG
32	Capstone build 2	PROG — iterative development	ALG
33	Polish & deploy	SYS — deployment, privacy, safety	PROG
34	Showcase	SOC — communicating about computing	—

Practices — where they live¶

Practice category	Where it's built	How
Computational Thinking	Throughout, heaviest in Units 1 and 3	Decomposition, pattern-finding, abstraction, evaluation — every build week
Inclusive Collaboration	Every single week	Cross-age Driver/Navigator pairing with the no-touching-the-keyboard rule
Ethics & Social Responsibility	Unit 2 primarily; Unit 4 on privacy	Bias, hallucinations, synthetic media, publishing safely to the public internet
Human-Centered Design	Weeks 7–8, 16, 30–34	Designing for a player, the AI for Good sprint, the capstone

Dispositions — where they live¶

Disposition	Built by
Curiosity	The weekly Think About This prompts — the entire mechanism
Persistence	"Being stuck is normal. It's the actual job." Repeated weekly, all year
Critical Thinking	Unit 2 end to end; Week 25's verify-the-AI's-code lesson
Creativity	Weeks 7, 16, 26, 30–33 — open-ended student-chosen builds
Reflectiveness	Weekly share-out; "save and explain"; unit self-checks
Resourcefulness	Debugging (Wk 24); reading error messages; asking your partner first
Sense of Belonging	Cross-age pairing, near-peer experts, celebrating broken work publicly

Evidence of learning, without grades¶

There is no homework and no gradebook in this class. If someone needs evidence of standards coverage, use:

This map — concept-area coverage per week
The screenshot portfolio — dated student work, one per week per student
Live student URLs from Unit 4 — publicly verifiable artifacts
The observation log — see the teaching playbook

A folder of dated student work showing visible progression, plus a deployed website with the student's name on it, is stronger evidence of learning than a column of numbers.

High school specialty areas¶

The 2026 standards add six high school specialty areas for advanced study: Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Data Science, Game Development, Physical Computing, and Software Development.

This course is a foundational class, not a specialty one. But it deliberately gives the 9th–10th graders in the room a genuine taste of three of them:

Artificial Intelligence — the whole of Unit 2
Game Development — Unit 1
Software Development — Units 3 and 4, including deployment

If any of these students later take a specialty CS course, they'll arrive having already done the introductory version — which is worth mentioning to families who ask where this leads.