Day 28: Impromptu unplugged

AP CSA

While I had originally planned on making today a lab work day, the warm-up took nearly the whole hour so I made it an unplugged day instead.  Having students keep the computers away helps focus their attention.

The warm-up asked students to create a method called replace that would take a string, look for a word in the string, and then replace that word with a different word.   There is already a replace method in the String class that some students were aware of, but it drove home the reason WHY we create methods (and why other people create methods for us).

In my first hour, I had an a-ha about how I could "peanut butter and jelly-ify" the lesson a tinge by physically cutting up the string in question.  I noticed a lot of students wanted to magically remove a word, but they didn't think about breaking the string into 3 parts and then leaving out the "removed" word.

Another student pointed out that our solution doesn't work if the word is at the end of the string, but for now we will be OK with that.  I think this was the right amount of "stretch" to give students at this point.  We did a lot of back-and-forth - thinking about it together for a few minutes, then leaving students with something to try, and then coming back together.  That seemed to help the pace a bit.

AP CSP

Today was an interactive notebook day. Tomorrow we test!

Concepts

We did a ACT practice test.  The management was brutal.

One Good Thing

One of my students told me that they created a java program to finish their chem homework.  I love seeing how students can apply this to their real life!