AP CSA
In AP CSA I gave students a "finding errors worksheet" - it was actually really a great activity for students to think more intentionally about finding syntax errors. If I were to do it over again, I would have them close their computers for the first 5 minutes and then let them open the computers to test things out.Then we did a paint lab. I came ready for extensions with students, but at this point it is still hard for me to come up with appropriate extensions. I have a few students who are looking to be pushed, and I don't know how to push them with "System.out.print" statements. I also don't just want them to get faster.
CS still amazes me - so many students do "homework" that wasn't assigned. I had 2 students say they did our next two labs at home - they weren't assigned.
At the same time, I have a few students who are confused about some basic things around declaring and initializing variables. These are all students who have no prior CS experience. I am now thinking that needs to be a requirement for this course. Even if I have them do a short summer assignment in lieu of CSP, I think that might help those students start off in a more gentle way in the course.
AP CSP
We started with the exit ticket from yesterday. The question "What is the minimum number of bits needed to encode the date in the format of mm/dd?" always throws students. They think it is 5 because they only need 31 days for the days, but they forget the months. We talked about it doesn't matter what you are encoding, you just need a protocol that explains how the bits need to be interpreted. You can do 4 bits for the month and 5 for the date or you can make a mapping of 9 bits to 365 days in the year. Slowing down that thinking was helpful for students.Today students developed protocol for sending formatted text. It honestly took the full hour. It was important to have students test their protocol on some provided challenges. Here were some of the challenges I gave students:
#Sea horses hold each others’ tail$.
Goats have accents :).
Cows have best friends!
I had students share their protocols in google docs and then pulled them up at the end of the class to compare protocols for efficiency and accuracy. It was a good thought experiment and then I showed students how the HTML is the protocol we use now. I tried using a Wikipedia page to show the HTML under the hood but next time I am going to use this page instead - it is a bit more bare bones but it shows what students just did. I will probably re-visit this tomorrow.
Concepts of Advanced Algebra
We did a "Which one doesn't belong?" as a warm up and then did another set of exercises. I saw some of the best collaboration today. I am really impressed with how these students are working together overall. I am hoping we can keep it going.Between doing a "Desmos Intro" on Mondays and warm-ups like Estimate180, WODB, and NumberTalks, during Tuesday-Thursday, I think we might be able to vary it enough so students don't get bored of the conversation-style of learning.
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