A common challenge teachers face is finding quality materials for the classroom. This is especially true for niche subjects or those without an official curriculum. At my previous school, a colleague and I spent significant time developing and updating materials for our middle years technology/multimedia classes. The classes were essentially a design classes, incorporating elements of design thinking in projects that included graphic art, desktop publishing, 3D modeling, and programming through the lens of product creation.
As a school, we would later transition to the IB’s MYP (Middle Years Programme), which does include a design class — a transition I plan to discuss in a later post, mostly because of its inadequacies.
The prepackaged educational materials, often subscription-based, were either inflexible to our needs, prohibitively expensive, or served only as a temporary solution when we realized we wouldn’t have time to create a complete unit.
When designing materials or new units, finding suitable materials was a continual source of frustration, with that frustration often falling under one or more of the following:
At a minimum, outdated resources or those intended for adults could be adapted for use with middle school students. The prepackaged educational materials, often subscription-based, were either inflexible to our needs, prohibitively expensive, or served only as a temporary solution when we realized we wouldn’t have time to create a complete unit. In the end, the majority of what we created was built by us, sometimes drawing from assets we had found or purchased. For most teachers who don’t teach primary subjects like math, English, and the sciences, I believe this is a common theme.
The rhythm we settled into, after a few years of developing units, revolved around a set of slide decks containing core content. Each unit would start with skills building and practice before culminating in the creation of a final product. The content was often, though not always, designed in such a way that it could be adapted to accommodate new software or curriculum changes. In fact, the slide decks below were adapted from a Pygame unit that we’d run years before.
With the core content in place, we would supplement with videos, additional guides, and games to supplement the core content. While some of these were introduced at the beginning, most were incorporated later as we identified areas where students needed support. These units were fluid, continually changing and growing, but with a solid foundation it required minimal work to update them.
For me, the act of developing materials and seeing students engage with them has always been a rewarding experience. I found that the concept of adaptable and evolving units was crucial in connecting with students and maintaining engagement. The unit I’ve shared below is not meant to be static but should be modified and tailored to the students using it. This adaptability is one of the reasons I am hesitant to use many subscription-based online curriculum materials—they aren’t designed with specific students in mind. One cannot easily modify them to fit the class or the teacher’s teaching style.
As education changes, I’d like to see materials and tools evolve less around distributing highly-structured information to students, but instead in creating frameworks teachers can build on. I understand that for companies this seems anathema to making a buck. If you can’t lock someone into your source of information (I’m looking at you Kognity with your slightly improved version of a bland textbook) then how will you increase profits? Maybe by making tools teachers can use to develop, organize and distribute their own materials.
You know what the most used and successful teaching tools of the last 20 years are? Google Slides and Docs.
These middle year p5js slide decks are for an MYP Design unit I developed before leaving my last school. They focus on p5js, a JavaScript programming library based on Processing, to introduce basic programming concepts. While created with the MYP Design course in mind (as evident from the rubric and project log), the primary decks can be easily adapted for any curriculum since they emphasize skills-building. I hope you find them useful.
