Computer Science in Algebra this Year

     I have used pieces of the curriculum from www.bootstrapworld.org for the last couple years.  It has allowed me to make sure that students have a better understanding of how expressions and functions are evaluated using Circles of Evaluation.  I have, also, used them for composition of functions to give students another way to look at the math.  It has helped my students understand graphing better and how to write equations/functions and how that is different from evaluating a function.
     This year I was using www.code.org in my classroom for their Accelerated Course to give my students a chance to learn some coding.  While we were using this course and some other courses I noticed that there was a course called Computer Science in Algebra and then a course called Computer Science in Algebra: Course A.  The later was the first half of the Bootstrap World course 1.  I was excited to see this, since it has the same feel as the other code.org course that we had been working in earlier.  I thought that the visual approach to the material would be good for my students and it had videos and validation so my students could work and check their results.
     I implemented Course A in my summer school course and received very positive feedback from my students.  They said that it really helped them understand evaluation and and generating functions better.
    I am teaching a couple sections of Algebra 2 this year and am looking forward to using this course to make sure that my students have a strong understanding of generating functions and evaluating them before we continue with generating equations for other types of functions.  Many times, my students think that they have to take in all the information from the story problem and "get an answer" right away.  Even though the question has multiple parts to it with one asking them to 1st - write the function first and 2nd - evaluate that function with the given information.
     I think this will be a helpful beginning of the year and will give them a strong refresher to start the year.