notes-3-02
Today's Outline:
1) Review of what's going on recently (Check In)
- Demonstration of circuits project: Used pin objects for physical attatchment, then logic flows through pins, which helps know which input is which. Noted problem with maker buttons and mouse down scripts. Don't use this combination, causes icky things to happen.
- Tangent: From NAND to Tetris in 12 steps, course that goes from nand gates to high level programming with all the middle steps, often ignoring unncessary steps
- Tangent: How to create an AND and XOR circuit using water, center collection tube is and, collection drain is XOR.
- Sorting Demo: Everybody sorts themselves, although in a real distrubuted programming environment, many problems arise from such a situation since you don't know where the cursor is (locking)
- Monte Carlo Simulation: Robert wrote a tool to help find the area of a shape using monte carlo simulation, along with explanation
- Kathleen's response: Nice tools however not good for teaching squeak as they are very complicated
2) CSTA/SigCSE review
- See above tangents
- waiting for feed back on standards, defining level 3 curriculum
3) Projects
Let's focus on what we should be teaching, variables, etc.- What is the motvation for using variables? They can be annoying to use. Good for connectiong objects together. Unseen but important aspect of what's being model, (things that can't be set using tiles directly?)
- What can we use randomization for? Probability based things
(dice, spinner)
- MJ discovered that since code is another object, you can have code that deletes other pieces of code if we might be able to write some sort of virus demonstration with this idea
What people are working on for now:
| MJ | class project |
| Ben | intro |
| Mohammed, Zubin, Mo? | physics stuff - try to avoid just edtech |
| Erik | writing |
| Dave | writing |
| Romana | writing |
| Steve | Squeak for basic cs concepts but somehow needs to be brought to those without programming experience |
| Robert | infrastructure |
- Bounded iteration update: long and difficult however none nested loops might not be hard
- Object Under
Kathleen suggested that with so many menus that do stuff, how do we know which ones are important and which ones can be ignored.
Tutorials should show where people should go next. Kind of a guided walk through.
In the next day or two, Lenny will find time to talk about going ons in book and order somethings out.
HW: Think about what people shouldn't be seeing in the menus and how to order and group topics for learning.