Coding & Computer Science

4-H stem educator helping a child.

What is it All About?

Our world is based on technology. Explore machine learning, computer coding, and applications using software tools. Investigate hardware, software, networks, and data management.

Coding | Computers

Grow in Your Project

Beginner

  • Assemble computer and software tool kits
  • Deconstruct and reconstruct a computer
  • Understand how computers use numbers
  • Troubleshoot PC hardware problems
  • Install operating systems
  • Decide to upgrade or replace an old computer
  • Experiment with block coding

Intermediate

  • Identify network hardware
  • Design a computer network
  • Find an Internet protocol address
  • Understand different types of servers
  • Identify computers on a local area network
  • Add peripherals to a network
  • Secure a networked computer
  • Learn and apply a new coding language
  • Study someone else’s code to learn how they complete a task

Advanced

  • Share the ways you use a computer with an adult
  • Understand technology needs in your community
  • Organize a team to identify and set goals for community technology needs
  • Develop an activity plan
  • Teach a class on computers using the 4-H curriculum
  • Code a project from start to finish
  • Create a digital portfolio of projects you coded

Member Resources

Power Park series curriculum cover

Power Park Curriculum
3 levels (grades 4-12)

Free Downloads

Project Leader Resources

WearTec curriculum series cover

WearTec Facilitator’s Guides
4 levels (grades 4-6)

Free Downloads

Take Your Project Further!

  • Enter your computer programming or engineering design in a local science fair
  • Sign up for classes provided by your school or community education programs
  • Tour a local computer business (retail store, repair store, manufacturing company, etc.)
  • Compete in Showcase Showdown with a speech or demonstration about computers or create a PowerPoint to support a different speech topic

Applying Project Skills to Life

Enhance Your Communication Skills

  • Prepare an educational presentation how computer programming works and enter it in your county fair
  • Enter your project in a science or technology fair
  • Demonstrate how to install a program or repair a computer
  • Create a display about different types of computers

Get Involved in Citizenship and Service

  • Do a presentation for older members of your community about how to use social networks to stay in touch with their family members
  • Volunteer to help maintain computers at your local community center or library
  • Help other youth, senior citizens or others interested in learning about computers
  • Offer to teach a class on computer care at your local community center or library
  • Volunteer to help younger children with computer work at a community center
  • Start a printer cartridge recycling program at your school

Learn about Leadership

  • Teach younger kids how to be safe when using social media
  • Organize a field trip to a local lab, business, or industry to learn how computers and technology inform what they do
  • Plan a computer recycling day in your community

Showing What You’ve Learned

  • Make a poster on parts of a computer
  • Create a display about social media etiquette and safety
  • Exhibit a simple computer game you wrote
  • Build your own computer and exhibit it
  • Create a labeled chart, graph, poster or 3-D display showing the components of a computer and how it works
  • Develop a display of consumer choices involved when buying a computer
  • Create a display about computer technology, languages or hardware other than monitors, keyboards or disk drives
  • Write a report of a study on a computer science career. Include positions available, skills needed, course work needed to obtain skills and programs offered at universities and other institutions that relate to the career
  • Develop software. Include a statement of objectives and a discussion of the program
  • Create cards, certificates, calendar, programs, flyers on your computer
  • Design a simple newsletters for your club or another group using columns, charts, tables, graphs or other special features
  • Create a spread sheet showing income and expense (invent data or use for another 4-H project such as a livestock project, Babysitting, lawn mowing)
  • Design a web pages (for 4-H Club, project group, sports club etc.)
  • Design and build a kite on your own without using a kit

Adapted with permission from Wyoming State 4-H, Project Information Sheet, Computers. Retrieved from: http://www.uwyo.edu/4-h/projects/science-technology/computers.html.

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