This lesson attempts to walk students through the iterative development process of building an app (basically) from scratch that involves the use of if
statements. Following an imaginary conversation between two characters - Alexis and Michael - students follow the problem solving and program design decisions they make for each step of constructing the app. Along the way, they decide when and how to break things down into functions, and of course, discuss the logic necessary to make a simple game.
The last step - writing code that executes an end-of-game condition - students must do on their own. How they decide to use if
statements to end the game will require some creativity. The suggested condition - first to score 10 points - is subtly tricky and can be written in many different ways.
At the conclusion of the lesson, there is three practice Create PT-style questions as well as resources explaining the connection between this lesson and the actual Create PT. Depending on how you use these materials they can easily add an additional day to this lesson.
Students will be able to:
- write code to implement solutions to problems from pseudocode or description.
- follow the iterative development process of a collaboratively created program.
- develop and write code for conditional expressions to incorporate into an existing program.
- write a large program from scratch when given directions for each step.
Note: You will need to create a free account on code.org before you can view this resource.