BJC Sparks is a computer science curriculum for early high school and middle school being developed by the University of California, Berkeley, and Education Development Center, Inc. In a 2021-2022, a small group of teachers ran a pilot test of the curriculum and provided feedback to inform changes for the 2022-2023 school year, and this year, a second, larger cohort of teachers is piloting and providing feedback on the revised version.
Building on our lessons learned creating the Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (CSP) Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum for high school, these new materials use the Snap! programming language (an easy-to-learn blocks-based programming language based on Scratch), take a functional-programming first approach to introductory computer science, and are being developed to meet the CSTA standards for middle school as well as some of the early high school standards.