In this lesson, students are introduced to coding with turtle graphics. Students will begin to recognize programs as sequences and groups of commands. Students will learn a few basic commands and then apply them right away by writing their first program.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will be introduced to the layout of Tracy’s grid world and will learn how to use coordinate pairs to locate Tracy on the coordinate plane. They will add to the list of commands they know and can use to create Tracy graphics.
Students will be able to:
penup()
, pendown()
, and backward()
commands in their programsIn this lesson, students will learn how to use the left and right commands in order to move Tracy to more locations on the canvas. They will now have many commands that can be used to have Tracy create more complex graphics.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students are introduced to for loops. They learn how for loops simplify the process of making small changes to a program and help avoid repeating code. For loops are written like this:
for i in range (4):
// Code to be repeated 4 times
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students are introduced to the ability to turn Tracy at any angle. With this feature, Tracy can now draw diagonal lines which opens up the possibility to draw multiple shapes that weren’t previously available.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students learn how to use comments to describe their programs. Comments are helpful because they allow programmers to leave notes about the programs they are writing. Students will also learn about the different types of comments that can be used and the benefits of using them.
Students will be able to:
In this short lesson, students will be introduced to the rules for naming elements in their code. Variables and functions that are used inside their programs will be named by students, so the following guidelines should be obeyed to be sure that the programs written are readable and successful.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students are introduced to functions. They start with the basics of defining a function and why we need them and will revisit a program they coded earlier in the unit to rewrite it using functions.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students are able to add some flair to their turtle graphics programs by controlling color, pensize, and fill. These new commands are added to the list of commands that have been already practiced in order to allow for more creativity in student programs.
Students will be able to:
circle()
command to draw different shapescolor()
, pensize()
, begin_fill()
, and end_fill()
commands to add more creativity to their programsIn this lesson, students are introduced to the concept of Top Down Design. Top Down Design is the process of breaking down a program into functions or smaller parts to avoid repeated code and to make our programs more readable.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will learn about a fundamental aspect of every programming language: Variables. A variable is something that stores information in a program that can be used later.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will learn how to incorporate user input into their programs. Students will learn how to request user input as both strings and integers, where the input is stored, and how to convert strings and integers.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will dive deeper into the concept of functions by exploring how to use parameters to customize their code.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will expand their knowledge of for loops. They are aware that for loops execute the same lines of code a given number of times but will learn that i is actually a variable that can be used to control commands inside the loop as it is running.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will learn the extended parameters that can be used to control the value of i in for loops. They will then be able to use the variable i to control much more of their code by setting specific values.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will learn how to use If Statements which will allow them to use conditions to determine how their code should run.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will learn how to expand on If Statements by including a way to have Tracy make decisions between multiple scenarios.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will learn that while loops allow code to be executed repeatedly based on a condition. They will also be warned that infinite loops are created if the exit condition of the while loop is never met, causing the code inside the while loop to repeat continuously which causes the program to crash.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students will put together all the concepts they’ve learned thus far. They will be able to use top down design and to write programs that will solve complex problems.
Students will be able to:
In this lesson, students review content with a 25 question End-of-Unit Quiz.
Students will be able to: