I am going to use it all … Flippy Do …Cisco game… understanding comes through comprehension and practice
I liked the flippy do and loved the game. The game gave them the practice and the flippy do is the manipulative that some need and will graduate from. However, I had a difficult time understanding the instructions to the worksheet. I have noticed that this is too a learning process for me and that for some lessons the questions that I too have been answered as I am teaching. So maybe the worksheet will come to me but for now can somebody post the solutions to the worksheet?
As many others have mentioned already, I think the flippy-do is a great tool. As a math teacher, I especially like how it really focuses on place-value which is a very important concept that not many students fully understand. I am going to have my students glue/tape this into their journals. I am a big supporter of interactive notebooks, and putting these types of resources into the notebooks is really what helps students learn to look back through their notebooks frequently.
I didn’t really know what this class was going to be about (since it was a PILOT year) and did not really market this class to current students in our school last spring, and I ended up with a lot of 9th graders in my class. I’m a little concerned that it will take them a lot longer to understand the major concepts of this lesson. I think I may try to partner them up with some of my older students. Any thoughts?
As the basis for all computer operations, I believe that this action provides the ground work for the upcoming topics. My students are doing well in mathematics and we have already reviewed Binary, Octal and Hex by this point. Because of a type one student created a “Base 19” numbering system, which made other students want to try the same. Lots of good discussion on this topic.
This is the first lesson I have seen on here that was not presented during the phase 2 summer workshop. The flip book calculators is cool. Having taught ESC last year, the pattern recognition aspect of the binary system was not something we spent a whole lot of time on. I think this is also an interesting opportunity to have students look at an 8 but calculator and the identify a way for the student (or a computer) to translate the number into binary. The idea of asking a question such as, “Is the number greater than 255?” and then making decisions about which ones and zeros ae flipped over afterward creates a very simple algorithm that then directs the computer. Without knowing how the ret of the CSP class is set up, I could see my class going back and revisiting this algorithm as we learn more about coding.
As I mentioned in a previous posting I have a couple of students in my class with IEPs in math. One additional resource that I plan to use is to review this lesson with these student’s math teacher to get some ideas on how we might get these concepts across.
What I am finding interesting about walking through these lessons again is that I am starting to develop a visual picture of how they fit together and cycle back to pick up and then build upon earlier learning.
In the summer training, the Triangle activity was a help to me and I believe that my students will benefit from this as well.
On of the methods that I am going to try to recall prior learning will be to save the binary devices that the students made/used in a prior lesson.
I am probably going to go very slowly through these lessons.
This is one of the lessons that I will participate in with the students. We will for sure need to recall prior learning and perhaps think about the protocols that we used while sending messages via flashlight or some such tool.
Because I will have a small class this semester, I am going to try this activity as a whole class. Then, split the class into pairs and work on the activity (asking for a new protocol of course).
I think most of my students should breeze thru this lesson. The majority of them took ECS last year where we covered binary numbers and it seemed like they got it last year, so this might just be more of a review+extending what they learned last year.
I made a Kahoot that I used as an intro to Lesson 8. https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/ddeb5439-e96e-4946-9308-25c56d3581af
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Hi Stephen,
We do have a way (system) to provide answers to questions, including answer keys to worksheets…but many of them are still be moved into this new system. We pulled them all out of the lesson plans when we released them publicly to put the answers behind a teacher wall. Unfortunately, the teacher side of things was late to the party in getting engineered so we have a backlog of things we’re still porting over.
Of course if you have a question about anything. Just ask it here.
As you move forward in the course you’ll notice more and more answer keys available. If there is a worksheet with an answer key you can find it the “For teachers” area of code studio - it’s usually in bubble #1 for each stage. Unfortunately, this lesson doesn’t have one.
Most of my students have not seen binary before and this was a stretch for them. I also felt that the way binary was introduced was not as smooth as it could have been. I think lesson 6 did a good job of setting them up to think about number systems, but I had trouble making the connection in class via the lesson plan. I am going to need to put more thought into how to make that transition more seemless. For example, I wonder if asking students about how you would describe the rules of our number (decimal) system work?
I will be taking another half day on this lesson and maybe doing the Kahoot or worksheet mentioned above to get more practice.
Binary is a stretch for most students but the prior lesson of separating symbols from numbers should be a nice opening to this lesson. They don’t typically think that we are representing an infinite numbering systems with just 10 symbols. I might ask them why a circle has 360 degrees (odd number don’t you think?) It comes from the Babylonians who used a base 60 numbering system. So with the limitation of computers (on/off) let’s see what we can do with just 2 symbols.
I used the dice papers from ECS for my students. We started with the Flippy do and then went to the dice. Two students from last year’s ECS suggested them because they were easy and we took a video of their performance. They love to perform so it went well. I had two students make a video of the binary demo and they all loved it!