To kick off a unit devoted to group problem solving and developing products for other users, students begin by investigating the design of various teapots. Students analyze each teapot, attempting to identify how specific user needs might have informed its design. By considering these design choices, and attempting to match each teapot with a potential user, students can begin to see how taking a user-centered approach to designing products (both physical and digital) can make those products more useful and usable. To conclude the activity, students are asked to propose some changes to one of the teapots that would make it more useful or usable.

Before starting to design apps, we need to help students to better scope their expectations. Because students will eventually be prototyping these apps in App Lab, they will be in better shape if their ideas align with the kinds of apps that are easily prototyped in App Lab. Teams start this scoping by looking through several example apps designed to demonstrate apps that can be created with App Lab. Teams then can chose one (or more) of the apps as a basis for their own. From there, teams have some time to discuss the basic functionality of their app before using 3x5 index cards to develop paper prototypes.

Designers need to understand their users’ needs in order to create useful products. This lesson encourages students to think about how to design for another person by role-playing as someone else using a user profile and reacting as that user to a series of products. Each student is assigned a user profile describing a person, which they then use to choose appropriate products, critique product design, and suggest improvements to design.

This lesson guides students through an abbreviated version of the design process they will be seeing throughout this unit. Students first brainstorm a list of potential users of smart clothing. As a class, they then group these ideas into broad categories and each group will choose one category of user. Groups repeat this process to brainstorm needs or concerns of their user, eventually categorizing these needs and choosing one to focus on. Finally, students design a piece of smart clothing, using the specific needs and concerns they brainstormed to guide their decision making. At the end of the class students quickly share their decision-making process and get feedback on how well their product addresses the user need they selected.

Following the mini design project, students look towards the next phase of design - prototyping a product that attempts to address user needs. In teams, students examine a paper prototype for a chat app called "Txt Ur Grndkdz". Through using this paper prototype, students get a chance to see how a simple paper prototype can be used to quickly test ideas and assumptions before we ever get to the computer. After "using" the provided prototype students begin to identify ways to improve the next iteration.

In this lesson students use feedback from "users" of the paper-prototyped app from the previous lesson in order to develop improvements to the user interface of that paper prototype. The lesson begins with a reflection on the fact that designers need to translate human needs with technology into changes to the user interface or experience. Students are then given a collection of feedback and requests from users of the app from the previous lesson. In groups students categorize the feedback and identify ways the needs expressed in the feedback could be met by changes to the interface of the app. Then in groups students will implement some of these changes to meet one of the needs they identified.

Up to this point students have focused on designing for users who are, to some degree, distanced from them. Whether through brainstorming, profiles, or text feedback, the connection to an end user has never been direct. This distance is designed to help students get outside their own head when thinking about users, but in order to get information more directly from an actual user, students need to rely on their classmates. In this lesson students pair up to become users (and designers) for each other, allowing everyone to directly interview their end user and ask questions to better inform their design. Each student pair interviews each other, attempting to identify a specific need that could be addressed by an app.

Based on the peer interview from the previous lesson, each student comes up with an idea for an app that will address their user's problem. Students then get to create their own paper prototype of their app ideas by drawing "screens" on individual notecards. A project guide directs students through the process including building the app and testing it with their user to see if their assumptions about the user interfaces they created are accurate.

To kick off the app design project that lasts through the end of the unit, students first explore a number of apps designed for social impact that have been created by other students. The class then reviews the Define, Prepare, Try, and Reflect steps of the Problem Solving process as they develop an idea for an app of their own with social impact. Finally, students will form project teams and lay out a contract for how the team will function throughout the development of their app.

In this lesson students research apps similar to the one they intend on creating to better understand the needs of their users. Students work within their teams to search the Internet for other apps, then evaluate the ones they find interesting. By the end of the lesson, each team will have a clearer idea about the type of app they want to create and further refine who their target users are. Each team will maintain a list of citations for all the apps they examined for use in their final presentation.

This lesson continues the introduction to CSS style properties, this time focusing more on non-text elements. Students begin this lesson by looking at a website about Desserts of the World. They investigate and modify the new CSS styles on this website, adding their own styles to the page. After working on the Desserts page, students apply their knowledge of new CSS properties to do more styling of their personal websites.

This lesson encourages students to think more critically about how web searches work and how to find relevant and trustworthy information online. After viewing and discussion a video about how search engines work, students will search for information about several unlikely animals. They'll need to analyze the sites they find for reliability in order to identify which of the animals is actually a hoax.

In this lesson, students first learn how to specify custom colors using their RGB (red, green, blue) values. They then apply these colors to a new Four Seasons web page, which uses CSS classes. CSS classes allow web developers to treat groups of elements they want styled differently than other elements of the same type. Using classes, students add more styles to the Four Seasons web page, then use them to style their personal websites.

Students have spent a lot of time throughout the unit working on their Personal Website. In the final couple of days students finalize their websites. They work with peers to get feedback, put the finishing touches on the websites, review the rubric and reflect on their process. To cap off the unit, they will share their projects and also a overview of the process they took to get to that final design.

Every website has a purpose, a reason someone created it and others use it. In this lesson, students will start to consider the purposes a website might serve, both for the users and the creators. Students will explore a handful of the most-used websites in the United States and try to figure out how each of those sites is useful for users and how they might also serve their creators.

This lesson introduces CSS as a way to style elements on the page. Students learn the basic syntax for CSS rule-sets and then explore properties that impact HTML text elements. They work on a HTML page about Guinness World Record holders, adding their own style to the provided page. In the last level, students apply what they have learned about styles for text elements to their personal web page.

In this lesson students investigate ways to use websites as a means of personal expression and develop a list of topics and interests that they would want to include on a personal website. To begin the lesson students brainstorm different ways that people express and share their interests and ideas. Students then look at a few exemplar websites made by students from a previous CS Discoveries course to identify ways they are expressing their ideas. Finally students brainstorm and share a list of topics and interests they might want to include on a personal website which they can reference for ideas as they progress through the unit.

In this lesson students are introduced HTML as a solution to the problem of how to communicate both the content and structure of a website to a computer. The lesson begins with a brief unplugged activity demonstrating the challenges of effectively communicating the structure of a web page. Students then look at an exemplar HTML page in Web Lab and discuss with their classmates how HTML tags help solve this problem. Students then write their first HTML. A wrap-up discussion helps to solidify the understanding of content vs. structure that was developed throughout the lesson.

In this lesson, students continue to use HTML to structure text on web pages, this time with headings. Students learn how the different heading elements are displayed by default and practice using them to create page and section titles. Students then start to decide how they will organize their content on their own personal web pages. In the last level, students begin the project that they will continue to work on throughout the unit.

As students have recently spent some time thinking about the actual content that will go into their personal website, this lesson takes a step back from the unit-long project (publication of a personal website) to help students articulate what personal information they choose to share digitally and with whom. It also reinforces the notion that much of the information that they choose to share digitally falls largely out of their control the moment it is released.

Students begin by individually identifying appropriate audiences with whom they would be comfortable sharing given pieces of personal information. They then look at several social media pages to determine what sorts of information people are sharing about themselves or one another. Last, students reflect on what guidelines they think are appropriate for posting information online.

The ultimate point of this lesson is not to scare students, but rather to experientially bring students to realizing precisely what level of control they don’t have in releasing information into the web.