Last week, I started writing some thoughts about my transition from being an English teacher to being a computer science teacher. The truth is, I still view myself as an English teacher. While I do not teach the same standards, many of the skills required to be successful in English are the same ones required to be successful in many content areas, including computer science.

When I began creating lessons for computer science, I started with a set of standards that were categorized into about 20 topics or themes for several months of instruction. With these as the start, I tried to think of creative ways to implement the standards. I decided to give my students reoccurring homework assignments. The idea was to have one week of vocabulary alternating with a week of ethical technology research.

For the vocabulary, I decided to do a crossword puzzle for every assignment. This kept things relatively simple for me, and my students didn’t mind them. The problem with crossword puzzles is that they are pretty easy to cheat on. It is simple to copy from a classmate without thinking at all, and it is even possible to complete an entire crossword with just a word list by counting the letters in each word. To mitigate this, homework was worth less than half a percentage point each quarter. The assignment meant nothing for their grade, so theoretically it is only worth doing to learn from (again, theoretically). I also made the puzzle more difficult by only providing the definitions as clues. For the word list, they had to interact with a program I built on Scratch that showed off coding concepts while also matching the vocabulary words with their definitions. As one student complained, they actually learned the words and definitions by doing it this way.

For the technology ethics assignments, I wanted students to look up recent articles related to both technology and ethics. I created a template for students to record their search terms, the URL to the article they selected, the author’s name, and the date. After that, I asked for a 2-4 sentence summary of the article. This was meant to be objective, as the final section asked for their opinion on the article or topic.

The literacy elements within these two assignments involved vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing. Beyond these fundamentals were digital literacy skills, including the ability to navigate a digital crossword, a Scratch program, search websites, news websites, and a digital graphic organizer. These new literacy skills required students to make choices about navigating their devices in order to get the information needed to complete the assignments.

I plan to use both assignments next year, as they worked fairly well to meet their objectives. At the same time, they are not perfect, so I plan on making some changes in the future with how I introduce the assignments as well as how I grade them. For example, I plan on looking specifically at spelling on the vocabulary crosswords as spelling is a vital skill for line programming in computer science.