Football Challenge: A lesson covered by Grade 6 and 7 classes on the 23rd of July 2019. Listen on Soundcloud
The Help Button.
To get help, when using Purple Mash, we use the blue button which provides us with relevant help videos. Remember: by going to the blue button and the hints shows us how to complete a challenge -with help. Our aim is to eventually get to do it all by ourselves. We use the videos as a help, for now; though later we carry out our work without help. Our experience will grow, being helped, will feed other areas of learning. Just do not make the mistake of relying on help. Remember that your goal is to be able to do it all by yourself. Come on code and try to understand what logic lies there. Computers have got a lot to teach you -as you interact and control how they work.Logging in to Purple Mash
You need to do the activity posted in the 2Do section of Purple Mash. This is where you start. The activities that are posted are carefully chosen by your teachers. So you are going to need to log in with your username and password. Logging into the system allows us to link what you do -as the machine registers who you are.Variables being Created.
We are covering the use of a function variable in the football activity with the Grade 4 to 7 learners, you now have gone through the way to do it. You can refer back to the videos that are posted inYoutube, linked this activity. The Football challenge is a more complicated activity; the lesson focused on variables -the type which function.Repeating Activities
You may have noticed that the Football activity is being repeated on a weekly basis. Do not get confused, if you see this football activity coming up again and again. Repeating activities that are assigned on a weekly or two weekly basis. This repeating of an activity is to deal with a task that is more complicated; in this Football Activity you are creating variables, with relevant names, positioning and set the speed of the ball.Repeating as Practice
The reason why the football challenge is repeating is to give an opportunity to practice, You will see and begin to feel more comfortable -especially when you understand how to do the challenges. That knowledge will help you get high marks, fed through the redoing of this in the future repeats of our Football challenge. You will use today’s experience to engage with to push up your abilities to work through the activity tomorrow (in the future).Careful Analysis: Learning
Another pointer: the complications of this task makes me ask you to go over it carefully -don't rush through it. If you rush through the activity you finish quickly, though will not necessarily master and learn as much.You learn more: by thinking and communicating with the machine, through the code -building your understanding. It is important to understand the logic -seeing how the pattern works; especially considering what happens when you put the pieces together in some sort of system or organization.
Seeing Systems
The components, our code blocks need to be organized i.e., positioned in the right place. By seeing the pattern taking form, getting to use it creatively; that is how you will understand coding -most coding languages have something in common. This means getting to know one way of communicating feeds a different way -based on what they have in common.Time while doing Activities
There is the right way of thinking about computer programming -defined by the language. The ability to be creative only becomes easy when you invest enough time practicing -then it is not difficult. If you rush through the tasks, you are going to finish quickly. But real understanding has a different approach -it requires more time.Rushing helps to finish -though its not a sacred rule to find what is best to learn -smart, creative people have worked through the activity thoroughly and thoughtfully. There are among us people that finish quickly, thinking or believing that is the most important way; yet understanding takes time. Its why people spend such a long period of their life at school learning.
Real learning involves thinking deeply about what you are studying; it gives you the means to take your level of understanding further into the depths of the subject. This understanding feeds into other areas of your life. That is how you become a real expert.
Skills and Knowledge
Your speciality or set of skills is based on what you can do; its what you take into the world -where it becomes valued like all the other objects. You will get to see these skill sets are bought in the economical world we live in. That skill set that you develop takes its place in the world of valued things. You could use what you know to create valuable things e.g., having a robot moves its arms to carry out an operation like open heart surgery. Doing open heart surgery is considered a highly valued skill. In that case it has code moving or directing the mechanical parts in established ways -through what it is taught.Computer Science in the Modern Era
If you do not have any skills, you're competing in the unskilled work force. Usually the coders are well regarded: as people with a 21st century skill set; many think that they are super, mathematically inclined. Many see the complex pattern -linked into mathematics- which is established in the hierarchy of disciplines. In most cases they get a lot of money -especially as computers, automation &c., take dominating positions in the economical world we live in.The field of computer science is becoming more established -it is reflecting the modern world we live in. All jobs have become taken up about computer coding, automation in some way or another.
Approach in IT Lessons: being adventurous
I want you to think deeply about what we are doing in our coding classes, experiment a lot more, change variables, move the code blocks and so forth. Get to see into the how the working organization of code blocks is affected by breaking its working system. In the Football activity we should be thinking carefully about the impact of friction; seeing how different numbers play on restricting the ball's movement.They might not see that you will see computers as energy transforming forms -they alleviate the drudgery of hard work. You can already see through this huge transformations in the future. All right, unofficial intelligence tool; you can already see how technology is changing our world, your life. Computers are recordings and expressions of what we do.