Pilot - U3L12 - Keyboard Input

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Notes:
11 students, 9-12th Grades with little experience in CS.

U3L12 - Conditionals and User Input

This was a successful lesson as a lot of my students were naturally getting to the point of wanting more abilities to control and manipulate their code/game.
What they struggled with the the boolean nature of the keyPress, returning a true/false value was a bit confusing for them.
Puzzle 4 (direction of the bug) was interesting because I got correct answers, but a lot of students were confused as to what was being asked of them. A had a bunch of students create four sprites on the screen, a few created different sprites with the keyStroke like an earlier lesson. I used GIF’s from the original Legend of Zelda to drive home the point of a character pointing in the direction they need to move (for logic’s sake) and they understood what it was asking after that.
The fish and gears were good because it wasn’t asking them to create anything, just read code.

This lesson reminds me of a suggestion - the students aren’t terribly comfortable with the drawing aspect, could we find more opportunities earlier in Unit 3 for students to create and learn to flip, resize, color etc…

That gif is a great idea. We can’t include something like that directly because of IP, but we could certainly make a look-alike. Teaching more about how to draw/manipulate images is something we’ve talked about, and actually added some in lesson 6 compared to the previous version of the unit. It’s a tough line to walk to ensure that students are equipped to create what they want, but don’t end up spending too much time drawing to the detriment of the lessons. Some features (like resizing and rotating) we’ve purposefully glossed over because they don’t yet work the way we want. Once the tool is a bit more mature I expect we’ll create some supplemental material to cover more of the drawing features.

Totally understand and yes, could do a whole unit on graphic design on some level or another. Good to hear that the tool is still being worked on - I do like the shift and cmmd key extensions - it shows a more robust program is in mind.