BENEFIT LESSONS
The course consists of three units divided into three to four lessons each, for a total of ten lessons. Each lesson is divided further into two to three lesson parts. A key term list appears at the beginning of each lesson part to call your attention to important terms and abbreviations.
Key Terms
Each lesson includes terms that are important for understanding concepts in the lesson and are intended to serve as guides to your study. These terms are boldfaced and italicized where they are defined in the text, and are compiled in a sidebar at the beginning of each lesson part. You will find the terms defined either in the lesson commentary, the assigned readings, in the glossary at the end of the Fluency textbook, or both.
Unit I: Connections—People, Computers, and Information
BENEFIT Online Discussion Forums
Connect with other currently-enrolled students for lively online discussions of each lesson's topics.
Lesson One Overview: Information Technology—IT Culture, Networking, And The Web
Rapidly escalating change has become a characteristic of our society. To bring this cultural change into historical context, this lesson examines enduring change from the distant past, the escalating pace of technological change today, and finally how to approach future advances by looking at common computer tools, the World Wide Web, and how networking computers together produces yet another level of change.
Lesson Two Overview: Searching, Search Engines, And Results
One of the biggest problems facing every user of Information Technology is information overload. Technology has expanded our access to information by making so much available through the World Wide Web. However the information presented is not always good or useful. This lesson will focus on some core concepts related to searching and evaluating information found on the Web.
Lesson Three Overview: Digital Representation, Debugging, And Computer Basics
All the information technology discussed in this course has one thing in common—representation. This lesson will explore how the information is represented in a computer. For a computer to process the information it is given requires:
- information in a form the computer can manipulate
- information in a form humans can understand
- instructions the computer can easily follow
- human knowledge about how to fix problems that stop the computer from doing what we want
Unit II: Programming—Telling the Computer Exactly What To Do
Unit II introduces the logical component of technology, including how decisions are made and how computation is performed on data. This Unit includes Lessons Four–Seven.Lesson Four Overview: All About Algorithms
This lesson introduces the logical component of technology, including how decisions are made and how computation is performed on data—in other words, programming. By adding programming to your static Web page, it can change dynamically—"on the fly"—based on certain actions by a user.
Lesson Five Overview: Programming Basics
Lesson Five covers the idea of containers that hold information on a computer (variables) and teaches you how to design a program that reacts in different ways to different events, such as the click of a button (or any object), or the press of a keyboard key.
Lesson Six Overview: Branching And Functions
Lesson Six discusses decision-making (branching) and naming sets of code statements (functions) that will perform specific actions in an identical manner each time they are called in a program.
Lesson Seven Overview: Iteration And Arrays
Lesson Seven will explore another important idea in programming and computers—the concept of iteration, or repetition of instructions. With those two concepts alone, programmers can accomplish most actions they want a program to take.
In addition to iteration, the idea of arrays is introduced to show how programs allow us to group similar things under one name and identify the individual items by that name and an index number.
Unit III: Information Storage, Retrieval, and Privacy
Unit III investigates the far end of the technology spectrum: data storage and retrieval, and protecting our privacy in the database era. This Unit includes Lessons Eight–Eleven.Lesson Eight Overview: Data Storage—Spreadsheets And Databases
The more data you have to manage the more powerful the tools you need. For simple tasks data can be handled by using Word documents or spreadsheets. The first portion of this lesson covers spreadsheet beginning with entering data, formatting, and creating formulas, to their advantages and disadvantages. The major portion of this lesson covers the concepts of a relational database and how to build one.
Lesson Nine Overview: Relational Databases—Table Operation And Sql Queries
Lesson Nine explores operations that can be done with tables to make them more useful, including building data entry forms and querying the database to access data and create, manage, access, manipulate, and view stored data. The standard language used today for querying a database is Structured Query Language (SQL).
Lesson Ten Overview: Privacy In The Database Age
Data is easily stored and information retrieved from data warehouses. What if the stored information is private, personally identifiable information? As technologies change and improve, the collection and storage of information, privacy protections face ever greater challenges. Legal protections have not always kept pace with the growing challenges in the United States.
Continue to BENEFIT Assessment & Completion
BENEFIT was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and developed by University of Washington Educational Outreach.
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