Doing the challenges (programming class 7)

Who: Baan Pathomtham 5th grade class
Where: at school
When: Monday morning, first day after a 1 month break

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Well, the kids hadn't worked on the challenges I posted here, so we worked on them in class.

Homework: work on challenge 3
This challenge is to reproduce the spiral below. They all made some progress and I am keen to see what they can figure out. Having reviewed my own code, I expect they will produce something more elegant than what I wrote.

Notes from today

As usual, they all did well with some finding different tasks easier and others harder. Mainly, I think it was an effective refresh of some things they might have forgotten and helped me assess where they are starting for this term.

Challenge 2: They all did this first.  I think they enjoy replicating a block of code and then experimenting with it. If I hadn't pushed them to move on, they would have been stuck playing with this for the whole session.

 

Challenge 1: All of them found it pretty easy to figure out what code was missing from the two short programs.  Also, they were able to copy and save the code, demonstrating that they haven't forgotten how to move around the system.

Kan did the most experimenting with code and came up with some really interesting stars by increasing the number of iterations on the star loop. For next time, I will ask them about some of these patterns, compare what would happen with a 5 or 6 pointed star and see if we can figure out why they get created.

Challenge 3: They all found this to be hard and have only started making progress. The key point is that they remember how to use for loops, but will need to be reminded of the different ways they can be structured and how they can be put together.

Feedback form

At the end of each class, I will ask them to fill out a short feedback form:

(1) Two things they learned:

They all said they learned how to make a submarine and many mentioned fixing the missing line programs from challenge 1.

Refresh of how to use for loops

Some talked about learning how to debug their programs when they made a mistake

(2) One question they have about the lesson or 1 new question they have because of the lesson

Everyone asked some variation of how to make the spiral, either how do we make it larger as we iterate or how do we change colors?

(3) One piece of feedback about what we did in class today

- Like making the submarine

- I liked working on the spiral

- I don't like doing calculations because they are hard and made me tired

- Don't like making the spiral because it is hard and uses too many techniques