Utah Computer Science: 4th Grade
- Level Elementary School
- Number of Lessons 34
- Grade 4th
This course is aligned to UT standards and is designed to provide computer science instruction for Utah fourth grade students. It is meant to be taught approximately weekly.
See the full syllabus for all topics and activities, or explore the course to try it out.
UNITS - 10 (34 lessons)
Students revisit the CodeHop Playground and core computer science vocabulary through a quick, open-ended animation activity.
Students learn how the parts of a computing system work together and apply computational thinking to plan and design creative solutions.
Students use event blocks, sequencing, and broadcast messages to control sprite behavior and explore how algorithms and coding connect to real-world careers.
Students use repeat and forever loops to build interactive games and practice decomposing programs to find and fix errors.
Students use if/then conditionals and operators to build responsive games and custom scenes, refining their work through peer feedback.
Students create and update variables and lists to track scores, store information, and power interactive games.
Students use clones and functions with inputs to build dynamic games, animations, and drawings with clean, reusable code.
Students apply conditionals, variables, operators, and data skills to design original interactive games, music tools, and data visualizations, and explore design thinking for accessibility.
Students explore how computing affects people and communities, how information travels across networks, and how to evaluate data for reliability.
Students investigate how machine learning models are trained, how AI chatbots use data to respond, and how to use generative AI responsibly and ethically.
Explore a sample lesson from this course!
The course introduces foundational programming concepts through block-based coding in CodeHop. Students learn computational thinking, sequences and events, loops, conditionals, variables, lists, clones, and functions, then apply these skills in culminating projects. The course also includes units on digital literacy and an optional unit on artificial intelligence.
The course is aligned to Utah's 4th grade computer science standards, including Algorithms and Programming (4.AP), Computing Systems (4.CS), Computational Thinking (4.CT), Impacts of Computing (4.IC), Data and Analysis (4.DA), and Networks and the Internet (4.NI). Each lesson lists the specific standards it addresses.
No. The Utah Computer Science 4th Grade course has no prerequisites and is designed to support all learners regardless of prior computer science experience.
The course includes 36 lessons, each approximately 45 minutes long, and is designed to be taught once per week for a full school year (about 36 hours of instruction total).
Students program in CodeHop, a block-based, interactive programming environment where their projects are saved to their own accounts, making it easy to create, debug, and revisit their work.
