U4 Day 4: PD Discussion Topic

Exploring Computer Science Unit 4 Best Practices
1

U4 Day 4: PD Discussion Topic

2

I would have the students experiment with making a sound for a sprite and managing the sound with a ‘play a sound’ block and a ‘play a sound until done block’.

I’d also have the students experiment with making a sprite say something using a ‘say’ block and a ‘say for 2 sec’.

Now they have two methods for making sprites have a ‘voice’ in a dialogue. Next they could working at spacing the dialogue using wait blocks.

3

It may be helpful to do this activity as a timeline. Basically students are given two timelines for each character and they have to fill in the spaces with either waiting blocks or a say block. It is helpful to visualize the timing of each character to understand that the code runs parallel. Having the groups trade timelines to read off would be interesting as well. Or even swapping only one characters’ lines. This is to show that when programming, Both characters’ timing have to be taken into consideration.

For example.

Char A: “hello there”-----------------------------------------“It is starting to get cold”----------------------------------------------

Char B:-------------------“hello, how is the weather?”-------------------------------------“good thing I brought my jacket”

1 Like
4

I like the idea of giving students a list of blocks and they have to fill in where it would go on pretend script.

5

The idea of using Scratch blocks in an unplugged activity will give students more confidence with programming.

6

Dialogue blocks could include sounds, conversations, etc.

7

The guidelines for this PD day mention using plans or pseudo code. Several of my students last semester did not want to take the time to plan their work and/or to write pseudo code. Has anyone found ways to encourage planning and pseudo code? I did make it worth points, which helped. I plan to emphasize that it is a necessary part of communicating with your programming team.

There’s also value to exploring and learning by playing with new features. I don’t want to shut down that creativity and spontaneity!

8

The students were clever in creating their knock knock jokes!