Computational Thinking - unplugged activity

Unplugged Activity | Computational Thinking

(Katie Apone - Code.org)
The lesson on computational thinking

is intended to teach you how to take a big, difficult problem,

and break it down into several simpler problems.

The goal in this lesson is to write a set of instructions

that someone can follow to draw one of the monsters

included in this lesson plan.

Students will break into groups to write instructions

and then will switch them with another group

that will have to draw the monster.

Groups will write instructions

using the four steps of computational thinking:

decomposition

pattern location

abstraction

algorithms

First, groups will decompose the task,

which means make a game plan.

Then they'll look for patterns between all the monsters in the catalog.

When they come across differences between the monsters

they'll abstract out, or remove, those details.

For instance, one monster in the catalog has vegitas eyes

and another has spritem eyes,

but they both have eyes.

So we can write a line that says, "This monster has _blank_ eyes."

So students will be able to write a set of instructions,

called an algorithm, that lists the monster's parts

with blanks for what the style should be.

This is the set of instructions they'll pass to

other students to recreate their very own monster.