Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
Merge pull request #202 from bjc-edc/csp
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history 
CSP --> Master (mostly for new "EDC Related Projects" page)
  • Loading branch information
@maryfries
maryfries authored May 28, 2024
2 parents 2671060 + f1c18d4 commit 4e3302b
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Showing 5 changed files with 143 additions and 3 deletions.
64 changes: 64 additions & 0 deletions cur/teaching-guide/resources/our-CS-projects.html
View file
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<script type="text/javascript" src="/bjc-r/llab/loader.js"></script>
<title>CS Education Initiatives</title>
</head>

<body>
<h2>Projects Related to Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) @ EDC</h2>
<!--<img style="height:100px;" class="noshadow imageRight" src="/bjc-r/img/header-footer/EDC_logo.png" alt="EDC" />-->
<p>Our work at Education Development Center (EDC) in K-12 computer science includes <strong>curricula</strong> for high school (BJC CSP), middle school and early high school (BJC Sparks), and elementary students (Math+C) and <strong>research projects</strong> that study the implementation and growth of CS programs in schools and districts.&nbsp;</p>

<h3>BJC CSP</h3>
<a href="http://bjc.edc.org"><img class="imageRight" src="/bjc-r/img/web/bjc-logo.png" alt="Beauty and Joy of Computing" title="Beauty and Joy of Computing" /></a>
<!--<img class="noshadow, imageRight" style="height: 160px" src="/bjc-r/img/ap-support/APCSP_ProviderBadge_lg.png" alt="AP CSP Endorsed badge" title="AP CSP Endorsed badge" />-->
<p><a href="https://bjc.edc.org/" title="Beauty and Joy of Computing: Computer Science Principles" target="_blank">Beauty and Joy of Computing: Computer Science Principles</a> (BJC CSP) is an introductory computer science course developed by the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC). BJC CSP uses the visual programming language, <a href="https://snap.berkeley.edu/" title="Snap! programming language" target="_blank">Snap<em>!</em></a>, to offer access to rigorous programming concepts without the overhead of syntax required by a text-based language. Both BJC CSP and Snap<em>!</em> are available online for free.</p>
<p>BJC is recognized by the College Board as an endorsed provider of curriculum and professional development for Advanced Placement® Computer Science Principles (AP CSP). Through a sequence of 8 units, the year-long course covers the 6 AP CSP Computational Thinking Practices and 5 Big Ideas with extra attention to programming including higher order functions and (in later units) recursion.</p>
<p>BJC CSP has been developed with funding from the National Science Foundation (grant nos. 1138596, 1441075, and 1837280) and the U.S. Department of Education (grant no. S411C200074) and is designed for use in high school in an AP or non-AP context and offered as CS10 at UC Berkeley. </p>

<h3>BJC Sparks</h3>
<!--<img style="height:100px;" class="noshadow" src="/bjc-r/img/header-footer/UCB_logo.png" alt="UCB" />-->
<!--<img src="/bjc-r/img/header-footer/NSF_logo.png" alt="NSF" />-->
<img class="imageRight" style="height: 250px;" src="/bjc-r/sparks/img/U3/L2/cat-example.png" alt="cat made from recycled cardboard with an embedded micro:bit" title="cat made from recycled cardboard with an embedded micro:bit" />
<p><a href="https://bjc.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/sparks" title="Beauty and Joy of Computing: Sparks" target="_blank">Beauty and Joy of Computing: Sparks</a> (BJC Sparks) is also an introductory computer science curriculum developed by UC Berkeley and EDC that uses Snap<em>!</em>. BJC Sparks and Snap<em>!</em> are available online for free.</p>
<p>BJC Sparks addresses the CSTA standards for middle school through 3 units that each cover a different programming style: Unit 1: Functions and Data covers the basics of functional programming through activities on string manipulation, data processing, and image manipulation. Unit 2: Sequencing and Iteration introduces imperative and event-based programming through sound and music, animation, smart systems, and data transmission. Unit 3: Physical Computing teaches physical computing using the BBC micro:bit.</p>
<p>BJC Sparks is being developed with funding from the Hopper-Dean Foundation, is designed for use in middle school or early high school, and can serve as a complementary introduction to the BJC CSP course.</p>

<h3>Elementary Math and Programming</h3>
<a href="https://elementarymath.edc.org/programming/" title="Coordinates" target="_blank"><img width="300" height="225" src="https://elementarymath.edc.org/wp-content/uploads/microworld-coordinates-crop-300x225.jpg" class="imageRight" alt="Coordinates Microworld" title="microworld-coordinates-crop" srcset="https://elementarymath.edc.org/wp-content/uploads/microworld-coordinates-crop-300x225.jpg 300w, https://elementarymath.edc.org/wp-content/uploads/microworld-coordinates-crop-768x576.jpg 768w, https://elementarymath.edc.org/wp-content/uploads/microworld-coordinates-crop-195x146.jpg 195w, https://elementarymath.edc.org/wp-content/uploads/microworld-coordinates-crop-50x37.jpg 50w, https://elementarymath.edc.org/wp-content/uploads/microworld-coordinates-crop-100x75.jpg 100w, https://elementarymath.edc.org/wp-content/uploads/microworld-coordinates-crop-480x360.jpg 480w, https://elementarymath.edc.org/wp-content/uploads/microworld-coordinates-crop.jpg 907w" sizes="(max-width:767px) 300px, 300px" /></a>
<p><a href="https://elementarymath.edc.org/programming/" title="Math+C" target="_blank">Math+C</a> is a collection of opportunities for children to explore key mathematical content through the block-based programming language Snap<em>!</em>. Lessons are organized in mini-units aligned to grade-level standards, in which students build and debug their own scripts in order to solve a series of engaging mathematical puzzles.</p>
<p>Math+C has been developed by EDC with funding from the National Science Foundation (grant nos. 1741792 and 1934161), and all content is available online for free.</p>

<h3>CSforAll Research-Practice Partnership between EDC and NYCPS</h3>
<p>Education Development Center (EDC) and the New York City (NYC) Public Schools (NYCPS) have been in partnership since 2015 to bring CS to NYC students. The purpose of the current research-practice partnership (RPP), which started in 2018, is to increase access to CS in all NYC schools, with a particular focus on enhancing and studying the implementation of high school AP CSP courses in high-need and low-performing schools.</p>

<p>The project is carrying out the following activities:
<ul>
<li>Understanding the challenges that teachers and schools face in implementing AP CSP courses</li>
<li>Providing professional development and implementation support to additional cohorts of AP CSP teachers</li>
<li>Refining school and teacher supports that include school and teacher leadership professional development, curriculum resources, and differentiation of PD supports using continuous improvement methods</li>
<li>Cultivating trust and strengthening relationships across the partnership to advance the work and support continued thinking about the problems of practice in <a href="https://sites.google.com/schools.nyc.gov/cs4allnyc/" title="CS4All" target="_blank">NYC CS4All</a></li>
</ul>
</p>

<p>This work is funded by the National Science Foundation (grant nos. 1441075, and 1837280).</p>

<h3>Improving Equity in AP CS Principles: Scaling Beauty and Joy of Computing</h3>
<p><a href="https://edc.org/improving-equity-advanced-placement-computer-science-principles-courses" title="EIR" target="_blank">Improving Equity in AP CSP</a> is a project aimed at building the capacity of participating high schools to support an AP CSP course centered on the BJC curriculum and to ensure that all students have access to equitable and excellent computer science instruction. For this project, which began in 2021, EDC is working closely with partners Abt Global and North Carolina State University to scale up and study the implementation of BJC.</p>

<p>The project features the following three central components:
<ul>
<li>A school CS equity program designed to broaden participation in CS coursework by using specific strategies and resources to recruit, enroll, and retain students from groups underrepresented in CS (e.g., female students, Black students, Latinx students, students from low-income families)</li>
<li>A teacher learning program that builds capacity for equitable and rigorous CS instruction and prepares teachers to support students’ successful completion of AP CSP</li>
<li>An emphasis on supporting effective use of BJC, including alignment with the AP CSP framework and BJC design principles</li>
</ul>
</p>

<p>This work is funded by the US Department of Education through an early-phase Education Innovation Research (EIR) grant (no. S411C200074).</p>



</body>
</html>
75 changes: 75 additions & 0 deletions cur/teaching-guide/resources/privacy-contracts.html
View file
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="/bjc-r/llab/loader.js"></script>
<title>FAQs about Accounts and Privacy</title>
</head>

<body>
<h2>Does BJC or Snap<em>!</em> sign school privacy agreements?</h2>
<p>The BJC curriculum is freely available and does not collect any student information, so there is no issue with privacy. The software used by BJC is the Snap<em>!</em> programming language. </p>

<p>Options</p>
<div class="todo">Start with some nice way to say "we can't sign any contracts" but then also "your students dont need any accounts. Also have some stuff about teacher accounts (with students) and space for what happens with student accounts in June. As well as - at a glance - you don't need student accounts."</div>
<p>FAQ</p>

<p>The software used by BJC is the Snap<em>!</em> programming language. Students do log into Snap<em>!</em> and save their programming assignments in it. So it's the privacy of Snap<em>!</em> that should concern you.</p>
<p>Taking off my BJC hat and putting on my Snap<em>!</em> hat (the teams overlap but aren't identical), I have to tell you that we can't sign your privacy contract, but the good news is that you can use Snap<em>!</em> in ways that don't send us student PII.</p>
<p>What you have to understand is that those contracts are written with commercial software in mind, software distributed by a for-profit company to schools that pay a fee to use it. We are the opposite of that. Snap<em>!</em> is published by the University of California, Berkeley, a huge nonprofit organization of which we are a tiny corner. We make no money from Snap<em>!</em>; it is provided to the world for free, and has no advertising, user profiling, or other evil features.</p>
<p>One implication of Snap<em>!</em>'s status is that we can't afford to provide some of the services required by standard school privacy contracts: audits, backups, teacher dashboards, and so on. With commercial software, part of the fee you pay supports those services. But you don't pay us anything.</p>
<p>Another implication has to do with signing contracts. UC Berkeley can and does sign contracts, but (in law as well as pragmatically) you can't have a contract unless both sides benefit. Berkeley doesn't get any benefit from your use of Snap<em>!</em>, and so it has no reason to take on a potential liability.</p>
<p>We care deeply about privacy. As I said, we don't profile our users. The only PII we collect is an email address for password reset purposes. ("Collect" is a technical term; people can save programming projects to their Snap<em>!</em> account, but we don't ask them to (which is what "collect" means), and we don't look inside the projects.)</p>
<p>The good news is that there are ways you can use Snap<em>!</em> without sending us any PII at all, by having students save their projects on your own computers or third-party storage providers such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Then they don't need Snap<em>!</em> accounts at all.</p>

<h2>Snap<em>!</em> privacy guidance for teachers and school districts</h2>
<p>See also our <a href="https://snap.berkeley.edu/privacy" title="Snap! Privacy Policy" target="_blank">privacy policy</a>.</p>
<p>Recent legislation in many parts of the world has led school districts to ask suppliers of computing services to sign privacy agreements making certain guarantees about how student Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is collected, stored, and used. In the United States, we get many such requests from schools using the Beauty and Joy of Computing CS Principles curriculum and from schools using the TEALS Introduction to Computer Science curriculum.</p>
<p>
For reasons explained below, we can’t sign your privacy agreement, but we are very committed to privacy, especially for children, and you can rely on that. Here are the main points to understand:
<ul>
<li>
<strong>Snap<em>!</em> and the Snap<em>!</em> Cloud are two different things. You can use Snap<em>!</em> without sending us any information, PII or otherwise.</strong> We don’t have to know you exist. To use Snap<em>!</em> in this way, you save programming projects on your own computer, rather than in our cloud storage. This is the <em>best practice</em> for maintaining legal compliance; we recommend it to schools.
<div class="narrower">
<p>To use Snap<em>!</em> in this way, you connect to our web site as usual: snap.berkeley.edu/run. This will download Snap<em>!</em> to your browser, and you have no further need to interact with us in that session.</p>
<p>We do log IP addresses of clients, so we could possibly determine that someone at your school has used Snap<em>!</em>. But we wouldn’t know who; IP addresses alone are not generally considered PII. If even that bothers your lawyers, you can set up your own Snap<em>!</em> server by downloading our <a href="https://github.com/jmoenig/Snap/releases/latest" title="GitHub repository" target="_blank">GitHub repository</a>. If you do this, your IT person should check regularly for updates, which are announced on our forum, on the BJC Teachers forum on Piazza, and on the TEALS forum.</p>
<p>
Once you have Snap<em>!</em> running in your browser, when you want to save a project, select “Computer” from the save dialog:<br />
<img class="" src="/bjc-r/sparks/img/U2/lab03/" alt="" title="" /><br />
The project will be saved in the browser’s download location.
</p>
</div>
</li>
<li>
<strong>Even if you use the Snap<em>!</em> cloud to store your projects, we collect only one piece of what might be considered PII: an email address to be used for password reset requests.</strong> The <em>best practice</em> for schools that want to use the Snap<em>!</em> Cloud is to set up class accounts in bulk, separate from any personal Snap<em>!</em> account a student might have, and <em>use the teacher’s email address</em> for all of them. Then we unambiguously collect no student PII.
<div class="narrower">
<p>Apart from the question of PII, there are other practical reasons for using the teacher’s address: It allows the teacher to handle lost passwords on the spot, without having to work out which email a student might have used. And it means the accounts are ready to go on the first day of class, without wasting that day getting everyone set up.</p>
<p>“Collect” means that <em>we ask for</em> a piece of information. Section 5, below, discusses how students might <em>choose</em> to put personal information <em>in a project</em>. We can’t police that.</p>
<p>It’s important not to undo the anonymity of your student accounts by, for example, using the school’s student ID number as the Snap<em>!</em> username. Student ID numbers are definitely considered PII; we don’t want to know them.</p>
<p>Our lawyer thinks that a student email address <em>by itself</em> is not PII. But we prefer a solution that doesn’t depend on your lawyer having the same opinion as ours. We need an email address; if it isn’t the student’s, that simplifies everyone’s life.</p>
</div>
</li>
<li>
<strong>We’re good guys.</strong> We do not profit from offering Snap<em>!</em>, neither directly via user fees nor indirectly through advertising or other creepy practices. No third parties have access to users’ email addresses, the only potential PII we collect. We do not profile users, period. We were already paranoid about Facebook and Google back when everyone thought those companies were your friends. Please don’t let a rigid rule designed for commercial for-profit providers of computing services get in the way of letting your students use Snap<em>!</em>.
</li>
<li>
<strong>But we can’t sign a contract with you.</strong> There are three reasons:
<ul>
<li><em>Legally, there is no contract without mutual consideration.</em> That means we promise to do something for you, and you promise to do something for us. (In a typical commercial contract, the latter would be your promise to pay the company money.) But with Snap<em>!</em>, you aren’t doing anything for us. We don’t charge money. We don’t benefit in any way from your use of Snap<em>!</em> other than feeling proud of our work.</li>
<li><em>We are not authorized to sign contracts</em> on behalf of the University of California, Berkeley, which is the organization that sponsors our work. And the University’s lawyers would never agree to a contract that exposes the University to substantial risk (if, say, someone breaks into our computer and steals our users’ email addresses and you sue us) for no benefit.</li>
<li><em>Those boilerplate contracts typically require us to provide services</em> that we are not equipped to provide, such as audits, daily backups, and/or interfacing with your classroom management system. We are half a dozen developers, with no IT staff and zero budget. <em>Commercial</em> providers of computing services to schools factor the cost of services like these into the fees they charge you.</li>
</ul>
If you follow one of the best practices recommended above, you don’t need a contract with us, because we collect no student PII.<br />
Beyond those main points, there are two other things you should understand about the nature of the service we provide and the ways that kids use it:
</li>
<li>
<strong>We have no control over what unsolicited information you or your students send us.</strong> This means that we might <em>possess</em> PII that we don’t <em>collect</em>, without knowing we have it, so we can’t promise that there is no PII stored in our cloud storage. For example, if a child makes a Snap<em>!</em> project that says “I’m 15 years old today” (as happens frequently in Scratch) that’s a piece of PII that is in our cloud, but we don’t <em>know</em> we have it. We can’t teach your students to protect their privacy. We do encourage them to be careful, in our official privacy policy, but children are children. Similarly, we have no control over choices <em>you</em>, as a teacher or administrator, make. If you create accounts for your students that use your student ID numbers as the usernames, you are giving us PII that <em>we do not want</em> and can’t control. Usernames, in particular, are visible to anyone who uses our community web site.
</li>
<li>
<strong>Our users want to share information with each other.</strong> This is another reason why you should set up the accounts for class use yourself, separate from students’ personal accounts. We have a <a href="https://snap.berkeley.edu" title="Snap! Community Website" target="_blank">community web site</a>, where users can publish their programming projects and comment on each others’ work. They learn from each other and from us (we participate on the <a href="https://forum.snap.berkeley.edu" title="Snap! Community Forum" target="_blank">community forum</a>). We may also aggregate information from <em>published</em> projects for research purposes. So if you do choose to use our cloud storage, you should disallow publication of projects from class accounts. You are then not responsible for what someone who happens to be your student does outside of school on their separate personal account.
</li>
</ul>
</p>

</body>
</html>
Loading

0 comments on commit 4e3302b

Please sign in to comment.