Cornell Tech provides CS lessons for kids at home

“This is our first-ever CS at Home broadcast,” Diane Levitt, senior director of K-12 education at Cornell Tech, told a class of third-graders from Public School 86 in the Bronx on March 26 via Zoom. “Thank you for being part of our experiment. We have never done this before. So it’s good to do it with friends.”

Levitt, with other members of her K-12 team, were piloting a new virtual lesson plan intended to help New York City teachers instruct their students remotely in computational thinking. The virtual lessons – as well as daily computational challenges posted on Twitter under the handle @Breakfast_CS – are part of their efforts to continue promoting computer science education for all children, even as the city, and the world, tackle unprecedented challenges.


Student draws creature

Lindsay France/Cornell University

During an online lesson piloted by a Cornell Tech team, students from Public School 86 in the Bronx create silly creatures using five features, and then wrote algorithms to instruct their fellow students how to draw them.

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