Our pilot lesson was with Group 2 of the pilot in Arizona! This lesson was simple to prepare beforehand. Very little prep time required. The warm up activity was a good way to build community. Sorting of shapes was a good way to introduce booleans. Though it had a tendency to go more mathematical so whatever you are sorting should be chosen by your student population, ex. legos or paperclips etc. Depending on the students and questions asked this lesson could vary between 20 to 30 min. The warm up we only did once but recommend doing it more than once. This is an intro lesson on conditionals so assessment is informal. Making sure they understand the vocabulary terms of boolean and conditionals at the end of the lesson is important.
This was a great refresher activity for my 8th graders. They had previously participated in the stand up sit down activity when the were completing the CS in Algebra course. I changed things up just a little. Instead of having a slip of paper with the questions on it, I made a survey in google forms and put it into Google Classroom and they filled it out for their bell-work. It saved me some time. I quickly printed the results and we started the activity. They had fun with it while learning. One thing that didn’t go well was that some students put pretty personal info on the last question. And then iIhad a handful that had to be class clown.
The shapes activity also went well. If all groups did not come up with the same answer we talked about it and came to a consensus. Overall it is a great activity to introduce or refresh the concepts of Booleans and conditionals.
It sounds like the kids had some great discussions. Toward the end of Unit 2, there’s a little bit on when it’s appropriate to share personal information, so maybe it’s an opportunity for review for the kids who’ve taken that lesson beforehand. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Notes:
11 students, 9-12th Grades with little experience in CS.
U3L10 - Booleans Unplugged
This lesson was a quick one because there are so few students in my class. I’ve done similar exercises in the past, with larger classes, so I knew what the aim of the lesson was, but my population didn’t allow for a lot of exploration.
With the shape sorting, my students are also competitive so that was now a challenge to do it the fastest which helped, but got a little noisy. Most of them understood it with only a group or two being taken over by a student, so I circled back to their partner to check in and make sure they understood the sorting through AND and OR.
However, with the lesson being quicker, it gave me time to be working with student that had fallen behind so that was a positive.