As well as building our introductory programming MOOC, Think. Create. Code!, the CSER group has been working away over the past 6 months on our next MOOC in support of teachers and the new Digital Technologies learning area: CSER Next Steps – Years 7 & 8. We are so excited to see it all coming together, and to have our first cohort of 340 teachers across Australia start to work through the course, and explore how Digital Technologies can be taught at years 7 & 8. Thanks definitely go to Digital Careers and Google for supporting us through this process!

The course is designed around several project streams, with the idea that students might engage in the computational thinking process of Digital Technologies through a project area that helps them in identifying a problem, designing a computational solution to that problem, implementation, and finally, evaluation of what they have constructed. These project streams cover a range of context areas, including Robotics, Data Visualisation, Games, Mobile Apps and Maker Spaces.

Importantly, they also provide projects that assume a range of background knowledge in Digital Technologies! We have included projects that use Visual Programming Languages, which would be well suited to some one who is new to Digital Technologies. We also have projects that use general-purpose programming languages, such as JavaScript and Processing. These would be well suited to someone who is ready to move on from Visual Programming Languages.

The course has just started, and we are excited to see so much engagement already on our community forum, and interest in the different project streams. If you would like to join us, it’s not too late, so please join in!