Computer Skills

About this course

Eleventh grade is where the systems material gets genuinely rigorous. The opening unit covers hardware, operating systems, binary, networking, cybersecurity, the cloud, databases, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and troubleshooting at a solid survey level. The seventh unit then goes back over the same territory at a much higher altitude: the memory hierarchy and why a computer needs so many kinds of memory, how one processor runs many programs at once, file metadata and the sync-versus-backup trap that costs people their data, how numbers are actually represented and where floating point goes wrong, network layers and ports and the client-server model, encryption and hashing and how digital trust is established, cloud elasticity and what it costs, why databases are fast (indexes, keys, and the ACID guarantee), Big-O notation worked through bubble sort against merge sort with real comparison counts, a diagnostic decision tree for telling hardware failures from software ones, and a lesson on algorithmic decision-making when software judges people.

One lesson deserves particular mention. The course explains how a large language model actually works: that it is a next-word prediction engine trained on statistical patterns, that the transformer's attention mechanism is what lets it track context, that hallucination is a predictable consequence of the design rather than a rare glitch, that prompting reduces but never eliminates the risk, and that everything in wide use today is narrow AI rather than anything approaching general intelligence. It teaches your student to verify rather than trust.

The Python unit is a complete course from the beginning, covering setup (either installing from python.org or using the free browser-based Replit), hello world, variables and data types, string operations, conditionals, loops, lists, functions, dictionaries, file input and output, debugging, and a mini project. A student with no prior Python can start here; a student who did the tenth-grade course will find the first several lessons familiar. The software unit builds college-ready skills: word processing, spreadsheets and charts, slide design, professional email, cloud collaboration, note-taking systems, PDF tools, video-conference professionalism, Canva design, and research with Google Scholar and citation managers. Internet safety covers password managers, two-factor authentication, phishing, social engineering, auditing privacy settings, scams aimed at young adults, identity theft prevention and response, and safe financial transactions, which matters more now that your student is close to holding their own accounts. Digital citizenship handles media literacy by reading sideways rather than straight down, who steers a social feed, ownership and credit, screens and sleep and the cost of constant task-switching, and a Christian vision for technology as stewardship.

There are 108 lessons in 9 units of 12, about 40 minutes each, and every lesson ends with a ten-question quiz that grades itself plus a written Apply or Practice task. Your family needs a computer with a real keyboard, Python (free, or Replit in a browser instead), an office suite, and internet access. Everything the course names is free or already installed.

What the course covers

• Memory hierarchy, processes, and operating system internals
• File systems, metadata, and why syncing is not backup
• Number representation, floating point, and where arithmetic goes wrong
• Network layers, ports, and the client-server model
• Encryption, hashing, and digital trust
• Database indexes, keys, and the ACID guarantee
• Big-O notation and comparing sorting algorithms
• How large language models predict text and why they hallucinate
• Python from setup through files, dictionaries, and a finished project
• Spreadsheets, charts, slide design, PDFs, and citation managers
• Password managers, two-factor authentication, and social engineering
• Identity theft, online scams, and safe financial transactions
• Media literacy, algorithmic feeds, and attention
• Typing code and symbols, professional email, and ergonomics

What your student will be able to do

• Compare algorithms by their Big-O cost before choosing one
• Explain how encryption and hashing protect data differently
• Write Python that handles input, files, dictionaries, and its own errors
• Judge when an AI answer needs independent verification and why
• Audit account privacy settings and set up defenses against identity theft
• Research with scholarly tools and manage citations properly

Scope and sequence

All 9 units of Computer Skills for Grade 11, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 108 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 108 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.