This is the last class of 3rd quarter so we're having a catch-up day. A few students need to finish their "Do it" assessment from last class, a few need to make up the "Know it" assessment they missed, and a few need to complete several of our daily "brain teasers" to increase their score on that standard. If your student has been able to keep up, it will be a nice, easy day as a reward. For those who have been absent, it's a last chance before grades lock.
We used today to demonstrate our ability to program a working app. I provided a list of requirements and ideas but then the students needed to write a bit of pseudocode to plan out their app and then program it. I showed them a currency convertor that asks the user which country, how much money they're taking, and then the app converts the US dollars to the currency of the selected country. Many of the students chose to do something similar but others tried other conversion apps. For those that didn't finish, we'll have an end-of-quarter catch-up day on Thursday. Overall, though, I'm impressed with their skills! Today, we took the first of our assessments, the "Know it". It was a Canvas quiz with some general programming questions in at the beginning, some "which block would you use?" in the middle, and then a debugging question at the end. Despite Canvas trying to foil our plans by not showing the pictures and marking many correct responses as incorrect, we got through it and most showed they were PROF or ADV. Love it! After the quiz, the students received a paper to create their pseudocode for the next assessment (on Tuesday), the "Do it". They will be writing a program that includes a list of requirements, and although the program can be about anything, I listed a few examples and showed my working example of a currency convertor. Our App Lab lessons were pretty extensive, but there was one coding structure left out that we need learn: loops. So we opened a blank App Lab project and learned a bit about loops. We used a For loop to count up to ten and a While loop to count down from 10. An easy screenshot and submission was the assignment today. After the loops, we reviewed for the upcoming assessments. The "Know it" review takes actual test questions (randomly from the question bank) and allows the students to see them. So there's no excuse for not getting all the multiple-choice right! The "Do it" review provided an example app, that if the students can create, would mean they will be successful on the assessment. The students can try it, get help, and figure it out before we take the "Do it" assessment on Tuesday. Today's lesson started out with great intentions. It introduced functions and how we can create one to call later. And the method for practicing was to create a game called, "Color Sleuth", which had the user try to guess which color was slightly different within four buttons. The first few steps worked great, but then... It got a bit confusing, and there were multiple ways that students could code it correctly, but when they got to the complicated parts, I couldn't always decipher how they got there, so I didn't always know what thing was holding up their code. So after a class-long exercise in frustration, I'm just having the students submit what they've got so far and calling it good. The assessment for this unit doesn't include functions, so I think we're fine. We were introduced to a simple conditional last class, so now we're expanding a bit and learning about Boolean operators. So with our conditionals so far, we basically used an "If statement" to run code if the condition was found to be "true". But what if we want to check more than one condition? Then we need "Else If" and "Else" statements. Now our code is looking properly complicated! As for Boolean operators, we use these to check the conditions for our statements. Our conditions can be true (==), false (!=), greater/less than (<>), AND (&&), OR, (||), or NOT (!). Who knew there were so many options? These lessons didn't include a project, but rather opportunities to practice and wrap their mind around the new code. With these lessons, we're adding two fun components to our code: conditionals and user input. First, a conditional is a feature in our program that will run certain code based on if something is true or not, much like our beloved flowcharts. So if we tie that in to the user providing us input, we can ask a question and then run specific code for each answer we might get. The App Lab used these two new features to have the students create a "Mad Lib", but we'll take it up a notch in the near future. Before tablets and cell phones, if you wanted to distract your young child for a while, you'd hand them a "Where's Waldo" book. Each page had an amazingly complex scene and your job was to find Waldo and other people/items amongst the chaos. So that's the inspiration for this assignment. The students need to create a four-screen game that has the user search the screen for a hidden object. It doesn't' have to be Waldo, but it should be a bit challenging. If the object is found, the score increases and the screen changes to the next scene. If the user can't find it, then there is a button that will move to the next scene but not increase the score. The best part about these assignments is that I get to play all the games to score them! In lesson 5, the students learned how to use variables to keep track of a score or lives in a game. When the user clicks on something, the students can make the program add or subtract from a variable, which makes the games much more interesting. By the end of this lesson, the students had created a game that had the user try to find the apple on a screen full of apples. If the user found it and clicked on it, the score would increase by one and the apple would be moved to a random location. If the user missed and clicked on the background, they would lose a life but the apple would remain where it was. We've learned how to create objects, change their properties, create variables, perform calculations, and show the user information. So what do we do with all these skills? A conversion app! The app we created was to tell a person how far their wagon traveled based on the user telling us: 1) How big their wagon wheel is (diameter), and 2) How many times has the wheel turned. Then we do some magic math and we can tell them how many miles they've traveled! |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2024
Categories |