Today was a little scary as we experienced a brief moment of terror as our time machine continue slipping and tumbling further into the “between world.” However, spy kids quickly realized that the Recon Rover had collected extremely valuable data on its night surveillance mission last week, which put them one step closer to being able to successfully program the rover to repair the time machine damage and return us safely to 2016.
Video of Patrol Mission: Download Patrol 2
Our task today was a security patrol mission where spy kids programmed their rovers to secure the time machine door and make sure no cosmic galactic rays were entering the interior of machine. This was our final basic training mission, and it included using what we have learned about looping programs to code for, directional control and distance, lights, and sound commands. After successfully completing their mission, all spy kids were awarded their Advanced Technical Operations Badges and they are now ready to move into the more complex and challenging advanced programming missions.
In coding, students worked on a couple different activities. In the first, spy kids raced against the clock, as they broke into teams and worked together to create a program, one instruction at a time. The following link has some video footage of our relay race programming : Download Relay Programming 1 The objectives for this activity included:
- Practicing how to communicate ideas through codes and symbols
- Using teamwork to complete a task
- Verifying the work of their teammates to ensure a successful outcome
The second activity was an introduction to debugging programs. Debugging is an essential element of learning to program. In this lesson, spy kids encountered puzzles that had been solved incorrectly. Their task was to revisit the existing code to identify errors, including incorrect loops, missing blocks, extra blocks, and misordered blocks. As part of this activity students learned to:
- Predict where a program will fail
- Modify an existing program to solve errors
- Identify an algorithm that is unsuccessful when the steps are out of order
- Reflect on the debugging process in an age-appropriate way
In addition to coding and programming we continued to work on our algebraic thinking by working on some basic word problems and algebraic games. Next week, we will move forward with another Hands On Equation lesson which will allow us to solve more advanced problems. We also continued with our Values In Action (VIA) character strengths as we explored the concept of zest. We learned that living with enthusiasm and excitement and viewing life as an adventure has a lot of benefits and is a great character strength to possess.
Third Grade Target Tally- Download Target Tally 3-1