Beauty and Joy of Computing

This page has been included to help keep teachers informed of the developers' current progress revising this curriculum.

Last site update on 3/22/19: adding Unit 5 Assessment.
Update on 3/11/19: adding Unit 4 Assessment.
Update on 9/9/18: refinements to Units 4-6 labs pages and Teaching Guides (to better cover standards, improve clarity, and respond to teacher feedback), refining/extending cross-unit Tic-Tac-Toe project, revisions to optional projects, edits to improve ADA supports, improvements to supports for Performance Tasks, additions to Teacher Resources page including two pacing guides (one for first-year BJC teachers and one for experienced BJC teachers).
Update on 2/4/18: adding "what you will learn" boxes to student pages in Unit 5, improvements to student pages in 5.4 based on teacher feedback, improvements to Unit 5 Teacher Guide.
Update on 12/27/17: finalizing Teaching Guide for Unit 6: How Computers Work, updating Teacher Resources page.
Update on 12/8/17: adding new unit, Unit 6: How Computers Work student pages and Teacher Guide, corresponding updates to NYC pacing guide.
Update on 10/11/17: removing problematic page from Unit 3 Lab 1, various minor updates to Units 1-5, Unit 2 assessment solution file added, Unit 3 edits to Tic-Tac-Toe project, accessibility supports, Performance Task links updated.
Update on 9/7/17: fixing issues with the clickable hints, file naming issues, and outdated references.
Update on 9/1/17: various refinements and corrections to student and Teacher Guide pages, further development of Unit 6 (still in progress).
Update on 8/4/17: further revisions to Unit 3 including removal of Sorting Data lab, refining pacing recommendations in Teacher's Guide including flagging with asterisks lab pages that a first-time BJC teacher might want to skip, adding 2017-2018 NYC Pacing Guide to Teacher Resources page, various smaller refinements to student pages.
Update on 7/25/17: making under-revision versions of U4 and U5 Teacher Guides accessible for teacher trainings, minimal updates to 5.5 for visual clarity.
Update on 7/12/17: making usable content in Unit 6 accessible.
Update on 7/7/17: major revisions to Units 1 and 2, in-progress revisions to Unit 3, revisions to Units 4 and 5, making room for a forthcoming new Unit 6, moving last year's Units 6 and 7 to this year's Units 7 and 8.
Update on 2/10/17: adding solutions to Unit 5, securing solutions in example projects, fixing minor glitches.
Update on 2/6/17: updates to Unit 5, including significant changes to Models and Simulation, cuts to Copyrights, smaller changes to Timing Experiments, Unsolvable and Undecidable Problems, and Data Processing.
Update on 1/8/17: major changes to Unit 4, Internet, based on teacher feedback: rewrote lab pages to improve readability, split long lab pages into multiple pages, added two optional (Teacher's Choice) Snap! projects, removed GPS Data lab based on reported difficulties, removed Weather App lab and the "Reading the Web with Snap!" and "Scraping Data from Web Pages" pages due to problems with the proxied HTTP block, and removed Innovating for Social Change because it included prep for the already completed Explore Task. This is an advance release of one unit of the 2017-2018 version of the curriculum. (You can continue to use the prior version of Unit 4 at the Jan 2017 link at the bottom of this page.)
Update on 1/3/17: made Unit 3 Lab 4, Combining List Operations, an optional "Teacher's Choice" lab.
Update on 11/17/16: changes/additions to Performance Task materials: added a Student Performance Tasks Page and simplified the existing Teacher Performance Tasks Page.
Update on 11/5/16: additions to Teacher Guide for Unit 2 Lab 6 and Unit 3 including the Lab Goals, assessment ideas, mathematical notes, and solutions; added Alternate Links page for edX BJC Videos; fixed buggy proxied HTTP block in Unit 4 Lab 1.
Update on 10/24/16: moved Unit 3 Lab 6: Encryption to Unit 2 as it includes content designed to prepare students for the AP Explore Task.
Update on 10/8/16: addition of BJCx videos to Teacher Guide Lab pages and complete list on Teacher Resources page, changes to Unit 2 Lab 2 Page 2 problems 1 and 2 (to make them more doable), other more minor changes to Unit 2 student pages, and significant changes to the Unit 2 Teacher Guide including the addition of Lab Goals, assessment ideas, mathematical notes, and solutions.
Update on 9/19/16: very few changes to the student materials (mostly typos), but significant changes to the Unit 1 Teacher Guide, namely: the addition of "Goals for the Lab" designed to help teachers target the essential skills learned on each student page, ideas for assessment, mathematical notes where we thought they would be helpful, and official solutions.

The 2016-2017 version of the site will remain relatively static throughout the school year. There may be minor changes (such as correcting typos, editing images, or teacher guide updates) but no major unit restructuring. For example in August, we marked a number of labs and pages as optional, but they have not been removed from the curriculum so as to maintain consistency for teachers familiar with these labs.

For 2017-2018, the completed version of the curriculum will be made available later in the summer of 2017.

Development Updates