I just did a quick look-over of the programming units, and I didn’t see anything using the “turtle” to draw (hopefully I missed something). In general, I’ve really liked the changes made to the curriculum this year, but I think the turtle really helped students prepare for the “robot” questions on the AP test. Other than assigning “Lightbot” practice on top of the Code.org units, does anyone have suggestions for how to prepare students for those questions, absent the turtle?
There is Karel programming on Codehs that you could use as practice problems once you have covered some programming concepts. The good thing is that it is graphics based and students will be able to see the dog (Karel) move around the screen.
Hi @johnstod,
If you’d like, you can still access the old version of the curriculum and do the turtle lessons:
Unit 3, 2019 curriculum (Turtle starts in lesson 4)
You can have your students manually access that link, or I believe you can assign them the old curriculum through your dashboard. However - caution - once your students access a lesson in the old curriculum, that curriculum will pop up on their dashboard. Both versions of the curriculum will be accessible to your students, but the problem is when students intend to access the new curriculum, they may accidentally click on the old curriculum and tell you they can’t find the assignment (or any other issue associated with clicking the wrong version).
We removed the Turtle unit for a number of reasons, one of which was we found students did not transfer their knowledge of loops to event-driven programming.
Students have the opportunity to practice robot-like questions in Loops Explore (Unit 5, Lesson 1).
We also found that with a solid foundation in programming, most students are able to reason through the robot questions by exam-time. For extra practice, I’d suggest using the formative question on AP Classroom.
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Hi-
Since in New England we have 3-4 weeks of school post AP exam, I decided to let my students choose an independent project to end the year. One option was to explore the turtle and digital scene project from the old curriculum. The students LOVED this project and how it ties programming and art together.
I came to realize, as did the students, that they understood parameters MUCH BETTER from turtle than what we had done in App programming. My students really struggled with that this year and their Create projects, unfortunately, clearly show this as well.
I’m wondering if anyone, either teachers, or curriculum developers at Code.org, has given consideration to bringing back the turtle in some capacity.
Thanks so much!
Joe
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@jporter Thanks for your feedback! Personally, when I taught the turtle version of the curriculum by itself, the moment when we added parameters was always the moment that I lost the students. They were completely mystified and felt like programming was hard! I wonder if part of the success for your kids was also the foundation that they had with their introduction to parameters which, when looked at from a different perspective, clicked! I don’t have any authority in the matter, but I would guess that we’re not going to see turtle back in the curriculum. I DO think that its a great resource (I use some of the old CSP lessons as sub plans when I’m out) and encourage you to use it to teach or reinforce an idea if it works best for your kids. Perhaps it is the best option for others as well!
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Last year I did not do turtle programming and my students struggled with the practice questions on the College Board and on the test. This year I assigned the self-paced turtle unit that goes through the old under the sea drawing. The students liked the unit. I followed this with the minecraft Hero’s Journey as homework. Then after a few pseudocode questions on paper, we attempted the College Board questions. It went much better with the majority of students telling me the CB questions were easy.
I can totally see this happening. Turtle programming is fun and can be very creative!