1: Introducing Marty and Programming
Step 4 of 4: 0.04 Marty Finds and Fixes Mistakes
First Debugging Practice
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| Digital Technologies, Design & technologies: Digital Technologies |
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| General standards |
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| Health and Wellbeing: Mental, Emotional, Social and Physical Wellbeing | |
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| Technologies: Computing Science |
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| Computing, Design and Technology: Computing |
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| International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) |
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| Elementary Technology Applications: Kindergarten to Grade 2 |
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In this lesson, learners will be presented with imperfect instructions. Marty is trying to get somewhere and the person who created the instructions has made a mistake. Learners will need to identify the mistake and fix them so that Marty can progress on his journey.
Color Card, for Marty, Instructions
For this entire lesson, Marty should be on the ground, not on a table. Additonally, the story text can be read with or without the presentation. There are instances in the presentation where media will showcase Marty moving, delete these slides if you want to model Marty in the classroom while reading the story; keep them to have Marty's movements modelled in the presentation.
| Timing | Activity | Possible adaptations |
|---|---|---|
| — | Warm-upShare with learners the objectives and success criteria, from the presentation. Then, have learners all stand up and face the front; make sure that each child has space so that no one bumps into anyone else and that no one is too close to a wall, this lesson will have everyone moving forward, back, and to the side. To start, let everyone have a good shake to loosen up their muscles. Tell learners that they are going to be following the leader, today, and that then they will be helping a real-live robot to follow instructions, properly. With your back to the learners, adult support will be watching what is going on, tell learners to follow your lead. Say and move in a sequence of steps:
Tell learners that you don't know how they are doing so you are going to face them. Repeat the steps from above: forward, right, back, left. This time, you are facing the learners. There should be some confusion because when you say, 'forward' you will go forward and they will not go your forward. Stop and say, "But I said forward and you are not going my forward. Hmmm" Perhaps learners will respond by saying, "But we are going our forward," or perhaps they won't and they will just copy your forward. Take time to discuss this confusion before saying, "take 2 steps to the right side." At this point, there should be a number of learners who go to their right side, be careful as there may be some bumps, so watch for learners who may be close together. Again, address the confusion. "Why did you go that way," if there are learners who moved to their right. "I said to move to the right." Learners may respond that they moved to their right. Have a talk and a think about how we might address this confusion. There is no right answer here, it is a chance to talk about how it is important that a person giving instructions is clear in what they are asking: the person listening needs to know where/what they should do from their own perspective. |
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| — | Get LearningShare that, "The children in Marty's village were having difficulties with instructions, too. Let's listen to their problem and see if we can help them." Read the story text from the slides in the presentation or from the resources section. The following video clip features in the presentation. It shows Marty responding to instructions with a bug in them. The slide with the video has an image showing how the cards are arranged, without Marty. Take time to think and talk about where the bug might be in their 'code'. | — |
| — | Time for PracticeLet learners know that they will need to investigate the children's instructions and see if they can figure out where they went wrong. The work will involve looking at the placement of color cards and what the children, from the story, are trying to do. Let learners in the class explore, with the color cards, what the villagers' sequences do and what they think they can work on to fix it. The examples from the workbook do not include measurements, so you may need to support the learners to line up the cards as they are displayed so that Marty will walk from one to the next. |
| Timing | Activity | Possible adaptations |
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| — | Cool DownRemind learners of the amazing work that they accomplished, "You were able to fix the instructions for a robot by changing the steps to move Marty! Well done! I'm sure the village children would be happy, too." Remind learners of the goals for the lesson, "To find mistakes in instructions," and, "to fix the mistakes." Ask learners if they think they did well with the lesson using a familiar formative assessment strategy: thumbs up for good, thumbs to the side for OK, thumbs down for not so good; a green, yellow or red card, indicating their thoughts; a one to one chat about the learning; whole class feedback using a PMI (plus, minus, interesting) approach; or some other strategy with which the learners are familiar. There is a traffic light emoji page in the resources section called formative assessment. Read the closing part of the story to close off this lesson and tie it into the next part. Carry out any end of lesson routines. Clear everything away. | — |
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The last part of the story is on the presentation slide that is after the example with the buggy instructions.
SupportRemind learners of the commands for each of the colours and remind learners to look for Marty on the card: "Is Marty in the correct place when you put down the card?" |
Have learners think of routes they could plan and break it. then have them draw or photograph the route to have a different group find and fix the instructions.
