This is what I had to do as well. The practice problems were very confusing for my students and myself included.
I think it would be more beneficial for code.org to give a problem to find a solution for using conditionals or loops or lists or whatever concept you’re teaching instead of these problem sets.
It would be better learning to have an easily understood problem (Example: make a guessing game from 1 - n. Keep track of the number of guesses. You must use conditionals in your code to check whether you need to tell the user to guess higher or lower). Then, have them walk through the solving process and code as you go. There are many ways to solve this problem and it’s an easy problem to understand.
This, to me, tells me if they are finding difficulty in coding, or are they finding difficulty in understanding what is expected of them via the assignment.
I agree were pretty difficult, but at the same time I appreciate the addition of more difficult material. In the past, it didn’t feel like there was always enough coding practice. I gave it to my students to try on their own and my more experienced coders, or those that picked up on it more quickly, enjoyed the challenge. I then went over this material as a class, as someone else mentioned, and this helped most of the remaining students. Hopefully they can keep these extensions, but adjust the “spiciness” a bit
Our class has also struggled quite a bit with this particular lesson and will be reverting back to the 22-23 version (I am a volunteer with TEALS assisting our teacher). We only were trying the emoji project. We didn’t even think about attempting the others since they require complex algorithm development and use features such as function paramters that aren’t introduced for several more units.
In addition to the overall complexity and difficult to understand instructions, it is frustrating that there is no good way for the students to judge incremental progress. The app literally doesn’t do anything until it is nearly completed. If it is to be salvaged, perhaps reordering the steps would allow students to guage their progress as they go (in particular, it seems like step 4 should follow step 1, since it allows the app to show the different questions and complete, even if there is no result text yet).
Additionally, some of the instructions are just flat out wrong or misleading. In particular, section “5”, which refers to a nonexistant variable (totalQuestions). It also requires #5 to be done inside the conditional for #4, but the comment to help locate where the work shoud be done in the provided code doesn’t make this clear – it is just sequentially after #4 unless the student fully grasps what a “nested conditional” is (or, possibly, studies the “need help” carefully). Finally, the “Check This Out!” mentions the “most specific to most general” being important for this part of the code, but the most reasonable implementation (including the one in the “Need Help?” area) just uses a series of exact equality rather than overlapping less than/greater than – so the hint is more misleading than helpful.
Compare with last year, where the practice also builds an app step by step (the star-color-clicker), but with guidance about each specific step and a working app at each stage as each skill is practiced. Thus, students can tell if they are able to move on much more clearly at each step.
The issues with copying/pasting emoji (which frequently seem to only grab one of the 2 bytes leading to gibberish), combined with the instructions that clearly don’t refer to the final version of the lesson definately lead me to conclude that this particular lesson did not recieve significant testing before it was deployed.
