alice-teacher Beginner Assignment

[ThomasWhite]

Just to jump on the bandwagon, I use a similar first day lesson with both my Middle School Alice class, and my High School App Programming class.  I pick a student who becomes our robot, and place him/her somewhere in the room.  Then I challenge the students to write a program that gets our robot to the door.  First, we have to create a syntax, which usually ends up being 2 commands: walk and turn.  Then they realize they need parameters: direction and amount.  Then they realize that they need arguments for the parameters: forward, backward, right, left etc.  Within a very short time we've got syntax that looks something like this:
[robotJames walkDirection: forward steps:2]
[robotJames turnDirection: right degrees:90]
[robotJames openDoor]
 
Even at the Middle School age, within 2 days they have the syntax down, and they have no idea that I have secretly got them following Objective-C syntax-more importantly they've been effectively introduced to words like "object", "method", "parameter", and "argument."
 
At first, I let them give the robot commands in real time.  But then, I challenge them to write the code in completion-they have to "de-bug" by getting up and testing one another's programs-this naturally leads into decision structures, not to mention a lot of movement and bumping into one another-totally fun at the Middle School level!
 
Finally, I challenge them to write a program that gets the robot to the door from anywhere in the room-this leads into repetition structures.
 
This has worked well for me so far, so feel free to steal away!
 
From: alice-teachers-bounces+thomaswhite=mvcs.org at lists.andrew.cmu.edu [mailto:alice-teachers-bounces+thomaswhite=mvcs.org at lists.andrew.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of A. Jeff Goldstein
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2012 1:04 PM
To: Alice educators
Subject: Re: alice-teacher Beginner Assignment
 
I completely agree.  Also, the pseudo coding relates well to the "storyboarding" techniques in our Alice textbook.
 
Sincerely,
 
Jeff Goldstein
Computer Science Teacher
Cox High School, Va Beach
 
From: alice-teachers-bounces+a.goldstein=vbschools.com at lists.andrew.cmu.edu [mailto:alice-teachers-bounces+a.goldstein=vbschools.com at lists.andrew.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of Prem Pathuri
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 10:52 PM
To: alice-teachers at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: alice-teacher Beginner Assignment
 
To allow students to actually visualize what a computer does, on the first day, I like to teach them what psuedocode is. I allow them to write down directions to do a particular task, and I pretend as though I am a robot and do EXACTLY what they tell me to do. This allows them to see the importance of being very detailed in their programs.


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