Day 26: Unplugged in CSA

CSA

I tried doing an unplugged activity based on Abstracting CS's materials.  They use egg cartons to teach strings.  I went to purchase a whole bunch of ice cube trays for $1, but after doing the lesson today, I think I would do it differently next time.

I like the idea of cutting out the scraps of paper, but I think instead of re-arranging them in the carton, I think I would just have students cut them out and we would go over a series of methods on the screen, having students physically manipulate the string to get the desired result.  Some students never used the tray, but I think if they were more movable, they would have used the visual.

I also spent a good amount of time looking at the documentation with students.  I tried to model looking at documentation so students will see that as a resource for themselves too.

Finally, we ended with a mini problem for students to do on white boards.  Then I gathered their work and had students correct the solutions on the SMART board.  I think I could even do a 360 classroom here where students go up to the white boards and write their code collaboratively - afterwards we could debrief the solutions.   This helped a lot because then students saw there were multiple approaches to the same problem.

Here was the prompt:
Write a method called endsWithVowel that has one parameter of type String that returns true if the last letter is a vowel and returns false if the last letter is not a vowel.

I like the idea of making Wednesdays (our shorter days) unplugged days.  I think it switches up the flow of the class a bit and then also forces me (and students) to hand write code.

CSP

I went back and did a mini "why we use number systems" in CSP today to help T-up the "encoding an experience" task that students are going to do tomorrow.  I added some articles about the perils of overflow errors.  Students started making their chart for abstraction.

Concepts

We finally took some old fashioned notes in this class about when you can/should use different strategies to solve systems.  That being said, I think 80-90% of the student issues are with attention to detail when doing BASIC math operations.  I think they generally know how PEMDAS works, but they mis-add, they do the wrong operation, they forget negatives... it is brutal.

Next we are going to do a ACT week-o-fun for MEA week and then move to quadratics.

One Good Thing

Technically this happened the other day, but I was talking with one of my former CSP students who is now in CSA.  I was mentioning that I thought having CSP before CSA was a huge difference maker -- I was thinking in terms of content, but her reflection was really good.  Essentially she said, "Well, I think it helped me learn that I wasn't going to get 'it' the first time.  I had to go back and refine my code over and over again in CSP, so I know to expect that now and that I will eventually get it"