Teacher's Notes for developing a program with a series of instructions Pro Preview

How to help students implement long programs. 

  • #379
  • 04 Feb 2017
  • 1:55

One block at a time

Students will do better if the program is tested more often on smaller steps. A problem in a long program is hard to identify due to the early age of the students.
 

Instant feedback from the robot

The workflow must be like that:
Place a block and adjust it. Start the program. If the robot behaves as expected, move on and add a new block.


If the robot makes an error, you must change that last block you just added.


This way you and your students will always know where the problem is.

English

When students are developing programs with a series of instructions there are a couple of things you as a teacher, as an instructor should be very careful about.

In the Yo-yo challenge students would have to use 6 blocks I think.

And some of them might try to place all the blocks in the software and run it. And it won't work. What you should be careful in a group of students and this is something important to direct them, to try to encourage them, to be careful that they are doing it is for them to always place one block at a time - one or two. So, they place one or two blocks and they try. They place one or two blocks and they again try. They should not try to develop at this stage of the course and at their age. They should not try to develop the program with many blocks ahead. Just let them experiment and try to even push them to experiment. One block at a time. This is very important because they'll have some constant feedback from the robot. If, for example, they make forward, backward and then they make a mistake with backward again, if they do a constant run and tries and constant feedback from the robot they'll see where the error is. And they can fix it immediately. And it's much more difficult when you have many blocks in the program. So, always one or two blocks at a time.

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