Hi, I’m curious if any teacher or school has submitted for UC A-G approval for XRP?
I’m sure my principal and district office will eventually ask this question.
Thanks!
Best, Eric
As far as wi know, no one has done that. Is there a way we can help support you in putting in that approval? @bradmiller could help describe what we did with the national standards.
Okay. I think I need to work with the platform and students before I’m ready to lead such an effort. But it is great to know who to reach out to for help if necessary.
Related to this, I’m hoping to understand pacing and course length for two groups of students: (1) students with no programming background and (2) students with a semester or more of high school programming experience. I looked at lego and vex curriculums last summer and decided against as I didn’t believe they were full 36-week programs or that classroom management of lego or vex parts was something I wanted to sign-up for. I still have a lot to learn with XRP, but I don’t think I can quickly ascertain if the current curriculum is 9, 18 or 36 weeks so I know whether to try and officially include it next year, include it but supplement with an initial semester of python, or some other content configuration.
We incorporated national standards from the NGSS and CSTA high school computer science frameworks. We’ve included module specific standard alignment pages which detail the standards that the curriculum was able to meet. For future classes, we’re planning on including standards from the NGSS, CSTA, and ISTE. The hope is that by covering a wide breadth of national standards, most state standards would also be met; but I’m sure we could also put together some state-specific documentation.
As for your question about programming experience, we designed the class such that there is no expectation of any programming background. To accomplish this, we incorporated Blockly code in the curriculum for beginner programmers. Also, we designed the curriculum to run for ~18 weeks (which we found to be about the length of a high school semester). This would change depending on on a multitude of factors like which modules you decide to teach, how quickly your class finished their activities, etc.
In terms of how to integrate the curriculum into your classes, I would say that it really depends on what you want to use the XRP for. For example, if you are teaching a class on geometry, you may only want to cover the driving module. However, if you’re teaching a course about algorithms, you may want to cover the robot control module.
Hopefully this answers your questions and please reach out if there’s anything else!
Thank you! 18 weeks is the important number to me. My school only supports year-long courses, so I’ll fill the other semester with software development. It feels right based on the XRP curriculum I’ve looked at.
I am responsible for a 3-course high school CTE pathway in software development. Pre-covid my school put a lego robotics first for 9th graders. I may need to do that for one more year (with XRP), but I’d prefer to have students that have taken python or AP CSP first.
I’d love to see some student and family post-course reflections if any teacher is willing to share. My school looks for those when doing pilots.
My school also cares about all the standards, thank you! Coming from a 30-year career in software development, I really appreciate using pi pico as a modern embedded processor, python, the REPL and everything that seems quite a bit easier to teach and more useful for students to use outside the classroom. Blocks is nice if I can engage with some of my middle school students. 