Day 14 and 15: Describe RoboCup & 'Play' Human Robot Tic-Tac-Toe

Exploring Computer Science Unit 6 Best Practices
1

For my challenge, I decided to look at both Day 14 and 15 since our school runs on a block schedule and periods are usually about 100 minutes long. The timing for both these days approximates 100 minutes.

2

As I stated in my Unit 5 Challenge, school is currently out of session so I have not actually tried out this lesson. That will have to wait till next year. (This year, I only reached the end of Unit 4 and did not have time to try out Units 5 and 6!) However, after having read the lesson, I would:

  1. Pretty much stick to the lesson as outlined.
  2. Create a pre-made chart or table in order to fill out in response to the ‘opener-like’ questions regarding how to play tic-tac-toe.
  3. Follow the advice in the PD module about turning the article reading into a jigsaw reading and perhaps skip the whole class discussion. Concentrate on small group discussions and maybe a very, very short whole class share out of one idea.
  4. Maybe revisit Scratch and review boolean operators and if-then statements before moving into writing out the instructions to tic-tac-toe.
  5. After spending time having students writing out their instructions, as an extension, maybe have students analyze the code to a Scratch tic-tac-toe game to see where commands differ/match and then amend their instructions accordingly. (One of my students created a Scratch tic-tac-toe game for the Unit 4 final project. This would be ideal to incorporate into this lesson.)
  6. Finally, I’m not quite sure how the ‘challenge’ would play out. This might be a definite trial and error process. If a team’s ‘robot’ successfully wins, then does that robot advance forward to play again? Does the human challenger advance forward? Is there a final victor? The whole teams playing against each other idea is a bit murky to me right now.
3

Sjkeys1,

This sounds great. Remember that by the time we are to Unit 6 we are constantly using other skills taught throughout the year. This lesson picks up on algoritms, sets of directions, problem solving, and the programming piece with Scratch - nice work!

Brad

4

We only got to the robot basics; building the robots and then trying out the different sensors and doing things like having the robot walk in a square shape, a triangle, a hexagon etc.