Summer SAVY 2017, Session 4/Day 1- Intro to Programming and Computer Science (Rising 6th/7th)

Posted by morganr1 on Monday, July 10, 2017 in SAVY.

We have had a fast-paced day in Intro to Programming! In the morning, students considered the qualities of good programmers, naming determination, persistence, confidence, perseverance, imagination, and collaboration as the most import characteristics of programmers. We are excited to see our students engage in those practices during the week!

After that, we practiced literal and specific directions to get ready to write instructions for our computers. Students described secret drawings to their team, attempting to get all of their group to create the same image without seeing the original image.

Then, we opened the terminal and practiced the building blocks of programming, getting familiar with integers, floats, strings, booleans, and basic expressions. After lunch, we got started on our first projects – students created simple programs that used a user’s name and age as input and printed out a sentence using their name and telling them the year they will turn 100! We also got started with conditional (if/then) statements so the programs would be responsive to different user conditions.

Tomorrow, we will explore iteration with for and while loops and start to build even more complex projects. Students will be saving their work on github. Most students had github accounts ready to go, but a few had trouble validating their accounts with email addresses. If your student had trouble with github today, please help them double check their account tonight so they can save their work!

If you would like to see your student’s work throughout the week, or if they would like to work on their projects at home too, all of their work is saved to their github account and runs on the free software PyCharm community edition. They may have a little trouble pulling down and running their files earlier in the week, but within a few days they’ll be pros!

Ms. Ashlyn Karan