In week 6
We spent the entire week working on Greedy. Students felt overwhelmed with Greedy so after a day of trying to figure out the math I created this simple math worksheet for them to do.
Finding change worksheet.
On Friday for our Feature Flick we watched a clip from The Simpsons, this somewhat summed up how students were feeling wading through code. J
Week 7
Introduced Binary Bulbs (thanks Doug Lloyd), got Buggy, and relaxed with puppies via the cs50.net/puppies link provided in the 2015 version of CS50 online. I found Buggy to be a really good review here. Common mistakes with loops and syntax was discussed. By doing a Buggy lecture I found it helped discuss the remix that was occurring with Binary Bulbs and discuss that some bugs are syntax and some are logic errors. This week we also discussed how students could use their edx.org account that was created for the purpose of accessing the IDE to also upload the assignments we were completing to edx.org to obtain that certificate if they desired. I thought this was an easy way to encourage students to be Lifelong Learners if they got accustomed to going to EdX to submit assignments “just because”. A few students liked the idea but are struggling with needing the tasks in the IDE and in Virtual Box to upload from Dropbox per the EdX specs.
I had the opportunity to take a formative assessment while reviewing Buggy. I turned Buggy into a 4 question quiz that I uploaded to Schoology.
Week 8
A few weeks back (week 2) I asked students to use Excel formulas to draw conclusions regarding a school-wide survey. My eighth grade students made a video of the results and this class watched the video and reflected on how students view school in general and what they like and wonder about our CS50x course. As a result of what they wondered we took a break from the CS50 curriculum because students mentioned that they wanted to understand more about design. We took two days looking at some programs available that could be used for their final projects and do not require you needing to know any code. Students quickly wanted to change the drag’n’drop features and noticed they could manipulate the features if they understood the code. This was on a whim but a great “break” and put us a bit behind the curriculum but refueled the need to understand what’s going on under the hood versus the interface people see.
Feature Flick Friday included: The Net
Week 9
We spent this week working on Skittles. We went backwards in the CS50 curriculum because I completed certain projects over the summer and just had not completed others before the students but wanted to expose them to them after I had a chance to look them over. I split groups up to define an algorithm for Skittles and told them that other than rand we already learned about modulo and loops via Mario and Greedy. Watching them work and write pseudocode as a small group of 5 versus alone was a good review and opportunity for all students to see how each other tried to solve the problem.
Looking forward:
Ceasar
Command line arguments
Strings
Looking back:
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