Computer Science I

Opening block, and the first coded results.

1. U1-01Complete survey chunk A, cold, before any instruction.
2. U1-02Establish course routines, syllabus, non-negotiables, and the provisional AI rule.
3. U1-03Complete the baseline cognitive instrument, Part 1 and Part 2.
4. U1-04Complete survey chunks B and C.
5. U1-05State what the surveys are for, that they recur in December, and that these responses become the dataset the class analyzes later in the unit.
6. U1-E02Visualize the coded results to answer a question about the class, and identify what the visualization cannot show.

• Aug 10 through 12 are instrument days: survey chunks A, B, and C, cognitive benchmark Part 1 and Part 2, one unscored constructed response.
• Aug 13: U1-E02.
• Aug 14: source reading. No objective code assigned.

Access. What the machine is, what limits it, and where a request goes.

1. U1-E01Compare fixed-response and open-ended items as data sources, and identify a theme no closed item offered.
2. U1-06Account for why the AI in this room does not run on the Chromebook in front of them.
3. U1-07Explain how a computer computes.
4. U1-08Distinguish VRAM, dedicated GPU, iGPU, and unified memory.
5. U1-09Determine what a given machine can and cannot run, and why — the two cards in the teacher's rig as the worked example.
6. U1-10Trace one request twice — same prompt, local stack and commercial cloud — naming each hop on both paths.
7. U1-11Compare what each endpoint is permitted to do with what arrived: local storage against a commercial provider's terms.
8. U1-12Distinguish *nothing persists* from *requests are unlinkable to a person*, and say which claim each system actually makes.

• Aug 17: U1-E01.
• Aug 18: U1-06, U1-07.
• Aug 19: U1-08, U1-09.
• Aug 20: U1-10.
• Aug 21: U1-11, U1-12.

Model internals, and the setup for next week's station work.

1. U1-13Describe pretraining, post-training, freezing, and inference as distinct phases.
2. U1-14Explain parameters at the level of what the model stores.
3. U1-15Explain tokenization at the level of what the model reads, using live token boundaries in MuggsOfPrompts.
4. U1-16Account for why token count, word count, and character count disagree.
5. U1-17Trace a prompt from text to tokens to output, inspecting candidate tokens and their probabilities at three points.
6. U1-18Account for why the model struggles to count letters, spells unusual words oddly, and treats whitespace as meaningful.
7. U1-19Assign a storage type to every field in the survey schema — integer, float, string, boolean, timestamp.

• Aug 24: Stack Unit Day 3 (schematics review), then U1-13, U1-14. MuggsOfPrompts goes live to students at end of block as an access check.
• Aug 25: Stack Unit Day 4 (whose computer are you using — network, server, cloud), then U1-15, U1-16.
• Aug 26: Stack Unit Day 5 (frozen numbers — parameter, pretraining, post-training, freeze, inference, knowledge cutoff), then U1-17, U1-18.
• Aug 27: Rained Out — student conferences and catch-up day.
• Aug 28: Standalone Friday lesson — Two Different Days (training vs inference, tokenization, why runs differ). Sets up next week's four-day station block. Test 1 content cutoff.

What the word better means, changed four times, with the last change testing the previous three.

• Mon Aug 31: Describe, do not judge. Single pass, hedge, specificity. No ranking.
• Tue Sep 1: Judge by correctness. Claim, verify, source. Three checkable claims per response.
• Wed Sep 2: Judge against given criteria. Criterion, subjective, consistent. No answer key.
• Thu Sep 3: Does the ranking hold. Run, variation, stable. Yesterday's prompt run twice more.
• Fri Sep 4: Test 1. Paper, Chromebooks stored.
• U1-19 through U1-26 are displaced by this lab and move later in the semester.

Turn four observation days into a report.

1. U1-27Distinguish bias originating in training data from bias installed after training.
2. U1-28Locate control at the layer where change is cheap: weights are expensive and frozen; system prompts, tools, and wrappers are editable in seconds.
3. U1-29Demonstrate installed bias in MuggsOfPrompts — author a system prompt, run it against a fixed battery, document the difference in output.
4. U1-30Hold the seed fixed and account for why that is what makes a difference attributable to the prompt at all; then reseed and account for what changes.
5. U1-31Test whether an instruction holds across a battery or only fits one case, and name that failure as overfitting.
6. U1-32Read published system prompts as primary source documents.
7. U1-33Read the system prompts of the tools this class uses, and distinguish a constraint that is *stated* to a model from one that is *enforced* by the architecture around it.
8. U1-34Write a reflection on how they have experienced AI so far.
9. U1-35Write a closing statement of how they intend to use AI academically going forward.
10. U1-36Code the resulting corpus by the method from 23–26: theme it, protect the outlier, synthesize under a prompt that preserves dissent.
11. U1-37Identify social desirability in a corpus written to their teacher, about AI use, in the class that grades AI use — and state what that implies about which findings to trust.
12. U1-38Distinguish uses of AI that build capability from uses that substitute for it, and state what performance under no-AI conditions requires.
13. U1-C39Locate their own position in the synthesis, or find it absent; revise the prompt; adopt the resulting document as the class AI policy.

• Mon Sep 7 Labor Day, Tue Sep 8 School-Site PD. Both out.
• Wed Sep 9 – Fri Sep 11: Lab 1 close-out, three days. Wed is the whole-report shape and the body form, Thu is the introduction + conclusion form, Fri is structured work time on both forms in that order (no exit ticket).
• 4th period is out Fri Sep 11, so Thu is their last in-class day. Nothing closes: every form stays open and every deck stays reachable, so anyone out — or anyone not finished — keeps working and submits when it is done.
• Every form except the exit tickets can be submitted early and reopened by the student using the "Edit your response" link on the confirmation screen. Submit lets Mr. Muggivan see the work; the reopen link lets the student keep improving it. Grading run Thu Sep 17 afternoon reads whatever the latest submission is.
• This displaces U1-27 through U1-33, which had been projected across these content days. They are not taught this week.
• U1-C39 — the class AI policy — is a closing objective that runs at the boundary regardless, and now has no block left before Sep 14 to run in. Needs a decision.

The paper rotation. Runs without software.

1. U2-01Restate what the class AI policy permits, what it requires, and where the class disagreed.
2. U2-02Answer an ACT-style reading item independently and in silence, then compare within your group and account for where you converged and where you did not.
3. U2-03Pass your group's answer and its explanation on, and check another group's answer for correctness. A binary judgment, quickly made, checkable against the key.
4. U2-04Evaluate that same group's explanation against a teachability rubric: the trap is named, the reason it is tempting is stated, and the sentence in the passage that settles it is identified.
5. U2-05Distinguish the two judgments, and identify an answer that is correct but unteachable, or wrong but well reasoned.
6. U2-06Name the parameters of the process the class just ran: how many independent attempts per item, what counted as agreement, who reviewed whom.
7. U2-07Explain why agreement on correctness is machine-checkable and free, and why teachability is not, and what follows from that asymmetry.

Reliability, adjudication, and the source claim.

1. U2-08Compute a reliability score per reviewer from performance on seeded items whose quality was known in advance.
2. U2-09Weight consensus by reliability, and justify the weighting against an unweighted scheme.
3. U2-10Design adjudication routing for items where reviewers disagree: to a second review, then to the instructor.
4. U2-11State a claim about your topic before seeing any evidence, and commit to it.
5. U2-12Vet a scholarly source against a checklist: peer review, author credentials, publication venue, date, presence of methods and references, primary versus secondary.
6. U2-13Select supporting passages from a set of unranked candidates, and justify each selection.

• MuggsOfSources deadline Sep 21.
• Fri Sep 25: Test 3.

Ranking off, attestation, quotes by selection, extraction damage.

1. U2-14Explain why the tool shows no ranking and no score, and what that would let you skip.
2. U2-15Locate every saved passage in the original PDF and attest that you found it.
3. U2-16Write how each passage relates to your claim, in your own words.
4. U2-17Mark direct quotations by selecting them rather than typing them, and explain why that makes misquotation impossible.
5. U2-18Record what you discarded and why.
6. U2-19Conclude, where it is true, that the article does not support the claim — and treat that as a finding rather than a failure.
7. U2-20Account for why PDF-to-text extraction can produce a fluent, grammatical sentence the author never wrote — column merges, lost ligatures, reassembled hyphenation, footnote markers mid-clause.

• Fri Oct 2: Q1 benchmark.

The principle, the pipeline, and the closing run.

1. U2-21State the general principle: a machine can be entirely scrupulous and still hand you something false, because the error entered upstream of the part being careful.
2. U2-22Explain retrieval-augmented generation as a pipeline — chunk, embed, retrieve, ground — and identify which stage this tool deliberately omits.
3. U2-23Account for why a passage that supports a claim may share no vocabulary with it, and what query expansion and keyword search do about that.
4. U2-24Compare where the document goes in this tool against where it goes in a commercial one, and account for what *client-side extraction* means for who holds your article.
5. U2-C25Run the model through the pipeline the class built: batch-answer the item bank, verify the answers and explanations under the same rules, and publish the accuracy number.
6. U2-C26Account for how often the model was right on passages you have read closely, and for the fact that you produced that number by building the measurement.
7. U2-C27Defend a source session orally: what you claimed, what you kept, what you discarded, and why.
8. U2-C28Perform an unassisted checkpoint and account for the gap.

• Thu Oct 8: Test 4, half day, test only.
• Closing objectives U2-C25 through U2-C28 run at the boundary regardless.

Paper first, no tool.

1. U3-01Decompose an observed website from memory into four structural categories: Project, Structure, Style, Behavior.
2. U3-02Write a specification in language and structural notation alone, with no visual representation.
3. U3-03Reconstruct a peer's specification, drawing only from what is written, having never seen the source.
4. U3-04Evaluate the precision of a specification by comparing it against a stranger's reconstruction, and identify the specific words or omissions that produced each divergence.

Gap types. Enter the tool.

1. U3-05Name the gap types that appear: contradiction, ambiguity, undefined behavior, gap.
2. U3-06Enter the tool in vibecode: describe something, watch it appear, refine by talking.
3. U3-07Write a four-panel specification in the tool: Project, Structure, Style, Behavior.
4. U3-08Compile, and read the artifact against what was specified.
5. U3-09Evaluate three chosen criteria against the rendered output: matches, missing, diverges, unspecified.

• Fri Oct 23: Test 5.

Amend the specification, not the page.

1. U3-10Amend the specification — not the page — and recompile.
2. U3-11Account for what changed between compiles and why.
3. U3-12Run a Markdown QC quick pass and record what it surfaced.
4. U3-13Identify specification lines that cannot be checked against any output, and rewrite them as checkable ones.
5. U3-14Identify anything in the artifact that the specification never asked for, and decide whether to constrain it out or write it in.

Specification faults, model ceilings, handoff.

1. U3-15Distinguish a specification fault from a model ceiling, and justify the call.
2. U3-16Decompose a criterion the local model cannot execute into simpler ones, and re-evaluate.
3. U3-17Build the handoff package: identify which criteria are worth a larger model's limited free tier.
4. U3-18Design a page using human-centered design principles and name its intended user.

• Fri Nov 6: Test 6.

Accessibility as checkable criteria. The first full cycle.

1. U3-19Identify accessibility requirements and specify them as checkable criteria.
2. U3-20Complete a full cycle against that design: specify, compile, evaluate, amend.
3. U3-21Read a partner's exported specification and predict what it will produce.
4. U3-22Compile a partner's specification and compare the result to your prediction.

Feedback on specification lines. The capstone begins.

1. U3-23Give and act on structured feedback naming specific specification lines.
2. U3-24Write a capstone specification with scope, criteria, and constraints.
3. U3-25Decompose the capstone into buildable parts.
4. U3-26Design a test plan covering edge cases and error conditions — the specification's checkable criteria are the test cases.

• Fri Nov 20: Test 7.

Build, refine, plan, direct.

1. U3-27Build against the specification and refine on what evaluation finds.
2. U3-28Set a project plan: scope, milestones, and the date each milestone is due.
3. U3-29Direct a self-paced project against milestones you set, reporting progress and blockers.

• Q2 benchmark and post-test window opens Dec 3.

Repository, deploy, defend.

1. U3-30Set up a repository, commit the exported artifact and its specification, and read a diff — and account for why the work now survives the course.
2. U3-C31Assemble the portfolio: the session specification with tracked changes, QC findings, and the amendments each produced — legible to a reader with the student not in the room.
3. U3-C32Deploy through Cloudflare Pages and verify the live URL loads from outside the school network. *(Dec 9)*
4. U3-C33Defend the build against its specification. *(Dec 10)*

• Dec 9: U3-C32 deploy.
• Dec 10: U3-C33 defense.
• Thu Dec 11: Test 8, half day, test only.
• Closing objectives U3-C31 through U3-C33 run at the boundary regardless.

Final exam.

• Final exam on the school's exam schedule.