This Summer, I have the honor of teaching an accelerator program for the Santa Monica Youth Tech Program. 14 hand picked high-school students will split up into teams and work on two civic tech startup ideas out of Coloft, 5 days a week for 5 weeks. Two hours each day, their minds are mine to shape.
While I’ve been a guest speaker at a few university courses, this is the first time I’m developing a full curriculum on my own. It’s intimidating.
These are the steps I took:
1) I looked back at my favorite courses I’ve taken and reflected on what I liked/disliked about them most.
2) I looked through similar curriculums that I was able to find online.
3) I read up on instructional design theories.
4) I found this article on what you need to do the first day of class. Then realized Carnegie-Melon had all these great resources to help guide curriculum design. It was nice to have this list of instructional strategies, and these things to think about when planning course content & schedule.
But mostly, it was a lot of throwing ideas on post-its, organizing it, realizing things I was missing, re-doing the process, etc.
The course starts next week, and I have my first week of classes all planned out! While I have a basic outline of what I’m teaching, the later classes will have to adjust based on the progress level of the students.
The five major topics I’m covering are:
- Startup Fundamentals – Personal goals, Business Model Canvas, Validation Board, User Personas, Keyword Research
- Design – Branding, Photoshop, Illustrator, Wireframing
- Development – HTML/CSS, WordPress, eCommerce Tools
- Digital Marketing – Analytics, SEO, Social Media, Paid Advertising
- Fundraising – Relationship Building, Pitch Deck, Pitch Practice
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