Game Day: System Schemas & State Diagrams
Since I gave my test a day later than the other teachers, I had to create my own problems and make it just different enough. Introducing the conditions earlier caused some focus to be diverted away from the drawing system schemas and state diagrams. Students focused on weird details and not really the big picture. Grading it is kind of tricky for me mainly because of what I really wanted students to focus on vs. what they actually focused on.
Draw a Flag
We started drawing with Pyret. I know that Bootstrap Algebra does this exercise, so I’m glad that the Algebra teacher who is using Pyret and I went over the exercises and the verbiage we’re going to use. We didn’t think that the redundancy in exercises would be useful, but definitely agreed that we should call things similarly and emphasize the way we use words.
Overall, I’m finding that the students were having a hard time breaking down the flags into shapes. For example, the Italian flag, they saw it as three shapes laying on top of each other. Whereas, myself (and kids who think like me) saw the flag as three differently colored rectangles beside each other. And then with the functions that took in 2-arguments, students had a hard time seeing they can draw 2 things and write an identifier that draws those two things and then do the same thing for the 3rd thing. For example, the Russian flag. I had a couple students who couldn’t see that the white rectangle on top of the blue rectangle can be one shape.
I’m not sure how I can make the thinking better of writing an identifier to make two shapes become “one” shape. I think it’s like counting. one is one. I don’t know how to teach the concept of one. Thank you to all our teachers who cover this concept. I’m having a hard time having students that if you combine two things as one identifier, it can be “drawn” together as one.
Learning with Ms. Medrano 