Sidewalk Chalk

Quote of the day: "It was one of those fight or flight things, and you can't fight a mouse." 12th grader explaining why he ran from a mouse.

We had a four legged mouse in the lab today, tiny and cute, but it's gotta go. The kids have already named it Billy and want to keep it.

Considering this week started with 7 inches of snow and today it is 80 degrees they have been a bit off the walls, even without rodents.

So, for the CS Principles class we went outside today. We've been working on Algorithm design (Big Idea # 4). To work on this we did sidewalk art. each team was given a copy of a lab we will program in C++ next month, and using pseudo-code they had to plan out a solution. We haven't done ifs or loops in C++ yet, but they all came up with a correct algorithm for solving the problem.

We started this fall with BYOB Scratch, and they seem to be doing much better this year with using methods in designing their programs. They all got exactly how to call existing methods to find the solution. I am looking forward to seeing if how their labs compare to previous year's students after drawing out their plans.