This lesson is computational thinking. Sometimes learning a new game can be tough, right? At
first it might seem really confusing and sometimes, there's no one there to teach you the rules,
so you have to figure it out on your own. The good news is that you can get better at
figuring things out on your own when you know a few thinking tricks. These tricks are unique
ways for looking at and solving problems. In this lesson, you'll learn about four tricks
and practice them with your friends to figure out the rules to a game. When you break down
a big problem into smaller pieces, you're using your brain to decompose the big problem.
Once we've decomposed the big problem into several smaller problems, we can go on to
our next trick, which is called pattern match. That's when we look for similarities between
things. Once I find the things that are the same, I can figure out what things are different.
When I remove those differences, that's called abstraction. After I have figured out the
steps to solving a problem, I can put those steps in a specific order called an algorithm
so that anyone can use my directions to solve that problem. We're going to use these four
steps to figure out how to play the game with no rules. By the end of the game, you'll be
able to play something that looks like this!