This week, we'll have you engaging in an interactive reading around the actual instructions that they, the AP provides for you to give to students. And this includes everything for the course, but we're going to obviously, be looking at the student instructions for the explore task. You'll have the opportunity to read through that. And we're going to ask you to make comments and questions about things you think students might have trouble with. Or that they might not be clear on, or that they might just struggle to do. This week, you're going to get started on your actual submissions that you'll be finalizing next week. By creating the computational artifact for your explore task on the computing innovation that you've chosen. Now some people get a little freaked out by the term computational artifact, they'll say, what? Is this code? Nobody told me that code was required for this class. And that's absolutely true, not only is coding not required for this particular computational artifact. Although it is allowed, we will tell you it is strongly not recommended. So what is a computational artifact? This is the definition of a computational artifact from the student instructions in the explore task. That said, they have it listed in a sentence. I pulled it apart into a bulleted list, which I recommend you do for your students, to make it easier to focus on. So we'll just go down them. You can make a visualization, a graphic. Honestly, I'm not exactly sure what the difference is between those two. Okay, a video, a program. Yikes, a computer program? Or an audio recording. The point being, it's a computational artifact, if you create it using a computer. Now here's a pro tip for a variety of different reasons. Do not encourage your students to submit a video, a program, or an audio recording. So I would recommend that for you, even if you're just reading it as an in-class assignment, let me tell you it takes a lot longer to grade those things. But most importantly and students never think of this, but their explore tasks are going to be graded in this big event where people, teachers are hired from all over the country to grade these explore tasks. And they have to do hundreds of them. And this is a valuable time to help students learn, because it's important not just for high school, especially if they go off to college. If they can make it easy for the grader to grade something, then that's going to help them get the best possible grade. Because graders are just human and they can be imperfect. And it's going to be a lot easier and faster for somebody to grade a visualization or graphic that the computational artifact rather than playing a video or playing a program. And an audio recording is also difficult. But certainly could be possibly important, for example, if you have a visually impaired learner. So next, here are the instructions about explicitly what to create as a computational artifact for the explore task. Again, they have this in a sense I've pulled into three bullet points. It says, create a computational artifact of your choosing. So the student gets to choose what to make, and there's not going to be any one right answer to this. The second is that this artifact must represent or illustrate the intended purpose, function, or effect. Either of those, that's an or, intended purpose, function, or effect. So probably a visual image around that of that computing innovation. And using any computational tools you wish. Now this isn't going to say clearly, but in general, we expect to see both visual images and words that are on there. And these have to be something the student creates themselves, they can't just take a screenshot of something else. Now people often wonder about this computational tool, and I'll tell you actually. When we were designing the course and these tasks, the first knee jerk reaction we all had was, as computing instructors, was just, well can't it just be PowerPoint. But what's the difference between using PowerPoint just because it's an easily accessible, well-known computational tool, versus maybe some more interactive, or more sort of design-based tool that maybe you can find online? And we really couldn't see how there was really any difference. So students don't actually have to learn to use a new tool for this. You can ask them to if you want, but PowerPoint, Google slides, those are perfectly acceptable, okay? It's not about learning to use a tool, it's about evaluating the impacts of technology, about the impacts of computing on society, economy and culture. We're just having to create a computational. And then, finally, so you're going to create your computational artifact. We're not done yet. This is helping you make sure to keep going and get along. We're going to have you to submit that for peer review for feedback. In case you would like some feedback on your computational innovation or artifact about your computing innovation. Next week, we'll finalized our project.
