Fall SAVY 2017, Day 2- Intro to Programming: Coding 101 (1st/2nd)

Posted by morganr1 on Monday, October 2, 2017 in Grade 1, Grade 2, SAVY.

Hello SAVY Parents,

We had another spectacular day of coding on Saturday. The students began by tackling an “unplugged” lesson or coding lesson about a concept that we explore away from computers. The students examined 9 steps for completing a task (folding a paper airplane) and determined unneeded commands and sequenced the necessary steps to complete the task. Next the students traded their algorithm (list of steps to complete a task) with a partner and followed them to actually fold a paper airplane. We observed that we can “de-bug” programs that we run in real life.

After transitioning to the computer lab, we worked on continued lessons in coding in blockly and had opportunity to observe the Java script as well. One of the new complexities we added to our coding involved tasks in creating art. Students were challenged to visualize and estimate distant of lines in pixels and angles in degrees. We will explore this more next week. Why is it necessary to understand current orientation when measuring angles? What types of artist drawings can we compose with our new skills that are both interesting to the viewer and express a concept?

Next week we will continue our Sphero work and double the robot time up front. Students will be programming robots to make 360 degree circles and combine 90 degree angles to follow the path that creates a square. This will be done in several lessons using a draw programming style on iPads. All these projects and plans gave us much to observe and discuss during our wrap up creating a chart for interface systems. What are the elements of computer interface systems? Where and how do computers meet humans in the information exchange. What are the elements of such a system? What are the inputs and outputs? How can we observe the interactions in this system to become better coders? What’s a Sphero?
http://www.sphero.com/sphero

Finally, because we know this is hard work, and we might be tempted to give up, we observed the following encouraging video. We remembered last week’s first vocabulary word for coding: persistence. Persistence means trying and trying again, even when the task is hard. I challenged the children – be THAT mouse!

Mrs. Byrd