About me¶
Hi! I am Sarah Judd (pronouns they/them but any are fine) I am based in Jersey City, NJ, near NYC. I work at a private school as their Design and Technology Instructor. I teach Media Computation (Processing, at least so far) and Physical Computing (Adafruit Circuit Playgrounds, so far - going to try to get into more electronics as we keep going through the class).
Visit this website to see my work!
My background¶
I was born near Chicago in the USA, but moved around a lot of the northeast USA (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York) the midwest (llinois and Wisconsin) and at one point South Carolina.
I majored in Computer Science because I joined the FIRST robotics team in High School and had a blast.
I got into CS Education because I thought everyone should get to have as much fun as I did programming, and I realized not everyone had access, because I had to move to a better resourced school to find it.
Previous work¶
I have, at some point, taught every grade between second and tenth, and for a while worked as a programmer on scripting work, but I’ve spent most of my time writing curriculum for others to teach
Code.org¶
A lesson on how Large Language Models work that I wrote for Code.org around a video they’d created, and another lesson from the same set that I wrote on Generative Images.
AI4ALL¶
I wrote curriculum teaching high school students about AI - how it works, what it gets used for, ethics. Mostly, these are in short 1-hour lessons that can be done in any order (which is what is still at the link). The lessons were meant to be interdisciplinary - I hope AI & Dance makes more sense in a dance class than a CS class even. Minimal Math necessary - everything is taught conceptually. Some of the work I’m proudest of!
AI4ALL no longer does K12 work, but it’s still an awesome organization encouraging under-represented populations in AI, just at the college level.
Girls Who Code¶
I helped create a project-based version of the Clubs curriculum, that was easy for students to come in and out of if necessary, and for teachers who have no experience to teach. I also started the “Women in tech” spotlights, showing diverse women in terms of interest, job description, race, and ethnicity doing cool things with programming at the start of each day. Most of the curriculum has been edited since then, but the women in tech spotlights still exist! I also worked on the 7 week long version of the Summer Immersion Program, where students learned CS for 8 hours a day for 7 weeks inside partner tech companies, covering everything from Scratch, Python game design, Web development, Data Science, and robotics and electronics.
Google CS First¶
Video instruction with screencasts mostly created for fourth through eighth grade, in the Scratch programming language. Encourages them to create things, introduces them to how CS concepts get used in the real world. I was part of a cohort of 14 people and two managers that came up with the idea and created from scratch as part of a two year contract. The art curriculum features my face, but I also worked on Storytelling, Friends, and Sports.