I’ve taught two or three semesters using the TEALS curriculum, and while there is plenty of helpful material there, I’d like to reorganize the pacing of my class to allow students more creativity rather than being bound to the student guides and mini-projects.
I’m playing around with a new pacing guide for next year and am curious to get some feedback. Under this pacing, I would teach concepts using an I-Do, We-Do project that every student had a copy of to follow along, and then they would continue practicing each concept in an independent project. By the end of about nine weeks, students should be wrapping up two projects: the class project and their own project.
By the 6th lesson, students will have been exposed to designing graphics and animations, functions (which we’ll use for sprite creation and animation), and conditionals. By the 15th lesson, we’ll have touched on loops, variables, and events as well.
Any feedback is appreciated. If you use any customized curriculum/pacing, I’d be interested to learn how you approach it.
The next revision, which will be ready for the upcoming 25-26 academic year, will have some support for middle school classrooms. In particular, we’ve converted most of the units into skillmaps to ease the reading burden on middle schoolers and on those for whom English is a second language. TEALS is a high-school program, and so the curriculum was originally written for that age group. We’ve needed to retrofit support for middle schools within the existing structure.
I’m planning on a major rewrite of the curriculum for the 26-27 school year, which will have proper support for middle school classrooms. I’m tossing around the idea of inviting beta testers a year early; I’ll definitely keep you in mind! It all depends on how busy I am at work; I’m hoping the crazy projects are less crazy so that I have time to spend on my favorite hobby, MakeCode!
@AlexK
I am a middle school teacher using the TEALS curriculum and would definitely be interested in being a beta tester as well! I am also going to be in the Infosys Pathfinders Introduction to Computer Science with Microsoft MakeCode Arcade course this summer, can’t wait!
I’m one of the authors (and, now, maintainers) of that curriculum.