Yesterday I found a stack of colored pencils taped together... I was not happy about it. Students misused time and resources yesterday. Today I showed them what I found, explained that ONE student did that, but the class as a whole could have benefited from more focus, AND that I expect today to be better. It was.
SO, I saw an opportunity to do a computational thinking activity in geometry. Because we are not testing on 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles, I saw an opportunity to incorporate CT into class.
Special right triangles can be a unit where we apply the same rules in 100 different ways. That is the WORST part about math. Sometimes it takes creative thinking, but most of it is plug and chug.
Originally, I thought students could make a Scratch program to help a user find the missing sides of their special right triangle. BUT, that is a big jump. Some of my students have never done Scratch before. I was going to show them a "mini" program in hopes that would be enough, but even that seemed like a big jump. Here was what I wanted to show them:
I decided to start with flow charts first. I showed students this video:
I love this video so much. Most students don't watch this show, but I think if nothing else, the video helps transition the class to thinking about flow charts.
Then I asked them to make a flow chart to determine if a triangle is a right, acute, or obtuse triangle. Here is what they came up with.
Overall, pretty good! I like that some students thought to ask "is it a triangle" first. Most people stuck with simple yes/no questions, which is fine, but I think I could have pushed them to think, what other questions you could ask to streamline the process.
I was going to show them the program I created and connect it to their flowcharts, and I think you could do that. You could make different programs for the different flowcharts to compare how the program would work differently - it could be a cool lesson! But, that wasn't the goal for the day....
Then we went to 45-45-90 triangles. The were asked to make a flow chart to determine the missing sides of a 45-45-90 triangle. Here are some examples:
Some students were pretty stumped, but it created a good problem for them to think through in a different way.
We ran out of time, so we didn't get to transition to Scratch but I am glad we left that out. At the end, most students felt successful - everyone had SOMETHING written down and felt like they could think in a different way. I think moving to Scratch would have made some students really excited and engaged, but others would feel left out. If I had another day, I would try to do the program in class, but the PLC is moving on to new content tomorrow, so... I will too.
I could see bringing this back for when we cover SohCahToa later on.
AP CSP
Projects continued. I did bring up some of the things I wrote about in my blog yesterday. I didn't have students ask me those questions in class. I had 2 students come in during our school-wide study hall to work on their projects.
A few other areas of opportunities I see:
- Students not understanding the scope of variables.
- In general control of variables seems to be tricky - doing x + 10 inside a call to setPosition won't change the value of x. I used the anaology of a variable being a "box" and you can get things from the box or add things to the box etc.
In general, collaboration in hour 2 seems to be a win. Most students are working with partners (as a required) and are experiencing success. I have also started writing my "tips" on post it notes and then giving them to students as a "takeaway". That seems to help too.
Hour 1 is still working more independently and I think that will show in their projects. I probably need to figure out how to do "feedback" tonight.
AP CSA
Students tested on the FRQ.
One Good Thing
In general, I was excited to be able to try something new in Geometry. I had never done this before with students and it was clearly "computational thinking" with a low floor - every student was able to do it. I think I could raise the ceiling by asking students to develop their own questions that might be solved by an algorithm, and then let them make flow charts for those.
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