CSA Alt U2L5 - FYI adjustments needed

CSA
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Hi Folks,

I’m creating a support ticket, but thought it might be helpful to give you folks a heads up here just in case you’re about to teach it before this is addressed and want to be proactive with your students. The choice levels (in Level 5) in alt-U2L5 are not very student friendly in this unit. Two of them rely on Arrays, which have not yet been taught, and the other two look like they were re-written to avoid the arrays but not in a very student friendly way. ie. they include statements like:
if (characterName.equals(“Batman”)) image = “batman-battle.png”;

Which, for a kid who’s just learned their first if statement syntax with curly braces, looks pretty foreign. It may be worth skipping them, working collaboratively, or doing some algorithm/whiteboard work instead of looking at this code.

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@madeline_r_burton Thank you for sharing this information. The CED aligned course is a mix of the Objects First course. The order of the assignments don’t always align well with the student’s experience. I have adjusted several lessons to help the my students understand the concepts a bit more clearly.

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Adding a few more here:

  • The * Unit 2 project 1a expects students to include an array, 2d array, or array list, however this is not part of the unit at all and should not be requirements for the project.
  • The lesson introducing Loops has a choice level where students need to enumerate a list of names (choice level A). This made sense in the original version (when the names are in a list), but now that they are in individual variables, you loop through and then use an if statement to identify which unique name it is. Because there is one case per name, the loop is essentially extraneous and confusing to a student trying to figure out where an appropraite place is to use a loop in their code.
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Thanks Madeline for highlighting the inconsistencies with the CED course. This is still mostly just a re-arrangement of the Objects first lessons to match the CED order, and unfortunately has a lot of ‘out of order’ content. I appreciate you posting here so that other teachers are aware of the issues, please also send a ticket to support@code.org to get these issues bumped up on their radar.

Best,

Lindsay