I feel like I’m about to drop my students off of a cliff with U7L4. It just feels like there is a big jump from Practice to Make in this lesson (more so that the other concepts). Has anyone already been through this activity with students? Did you come up with any additional scaffolding that helped? Any advice would be appreciated.
I don’t know if this will make sense to anyone else, but this is how I ended up helping my students think through the task. I made a handout of the code and we physically traced it to figure out where the arguments and parameters were coming from. We went line by line and explained what that line of code was doing and how it was connected to other parts of the program. I asked questions and had them try to make the connections on their own and then we discussed it as a class. I had them markup their physical copy of the code. We talked through the three functions they have to write (I asked questions(I jotted some down in picture) and they answered, but I tried to avoid saying “right” or “wrong”) and I asked them to write down pseudocode for how they think the functions will work so they have a starting point. Finally we ran through the program “unplugged” as if the player chose Rock and the computer chose Scissors.
I also enjoyed doing this type of interact-physically-with-code-on-paper type of activity to help my students grapple with some concepts.
Thanks for sharing your activity!