About

This unit connects AP Computer Science Principles to questions students already care about: what is a photo, who owns it, and how do we know it's real? Each lesson pairs a small interactive tool with a structured conversation. The tools run in a web browser, so they work on locked-down Chromebooks.

How to use these materials

Each lesson page is written to be read by students, with teaching notes (visible in teacher mode, the toggle at the top right) layered on top. The teaching notes give a lesson plan, explain why the lesson is built the way it is, and suggest how to adapt it. You are welcome to change anything. The design choices matter more than the specific script.

Every lesson in this unit follows the same shape:

Recall. Students say what they already know. This makes the lesson a continuation of their thinking, not a delivery of new content.
Explore. Students use a tool with a small, well-chosen set of controls. They are given challenges, but the challenges are prompts for noticing, not a worksheet to finish.
Discuss. The conversation grows out of what students saw. Questions are open, and thoughtful people disagree about them.

A note on how these materials were made

We used an AI model to build much of the supporting material: the interactive widget, the stock images, and first drafts of lesson text. This let us spend our time on the parts that need human judgment: what students should understand, which questions are worth discussing, and how to sequence the experience. If you build lessons of your own, we encourage you to work the same way. Decide the goals and the experience first, ask an AI to help build the pieces, and then test everything yourself, with students in mind, before you use it.

Outcomes

CSP Big Ideas

Big Idea 2: Data. Digital information is represented as bits, and representations can hide or reveal information.
Big Idea 5: Impact of Computing. Computing innovations raise legal, ethical, and social questions.

Practices

Computational thinking: Analyzing how a representation is structured in order to predict what a computation will do.
Communication: Explaining and defending a claim about a technical system.