Fall 2019
Why?
As the first project in 7th grade CS, we wanted a simple little project that will do a few things:
- Introduce students to a new programming environment (P5.js web editor, in our case)
- Teach/refresh students on syntax and some basic functions (Javascript, in our case)
- Allow us to gauge each student’s comfort level and coding ability
How:
- Write out a set of silly prompts. The sillier, the better!
- For younger students, it might be helpful to stick to more concrete prompts, like “ice cream”, “Ferris wheel”, etc.
- For our 7th graders, we went more abstract with prompts like “the feeling of being late to class”, “what happens when your favorite show ends”, “feeling sluggish”.
- Print, cut, and put prompts into a hat/bowl & ask students to randomly choose a prompt.
- Introduce students to:
- setup() and draw() functions
- Changing colors: background(), fill(), stroke()
- Drawing: rect(), ellipse(), line(), quad(), etc.
- Ask students to create a visual representation of their prompt.
- We added an additional constraint that students can only add at most 20 new lines of code or use 10 different shapes/lines. This was mostly to make sure the project didn’t drag on for too long. Most students enjoyed this added layer of challenge!
- Side note: I also felt that limiting the amount of code students can write on this first project prevents the more advanced students from going full throttle right out of the gate, which can further intimidate/unwelcome the beginners.
Extras Treats:
- Collect everyone’s sketches and project them on a big screen for everyone to guess the prompt.
- Buy some printable stickers (I got these from Amazon) and print stickers so students get artifacts of their work.
Things that I think would be fun to try:
- Lesson in using a variable to count clicks/track state: Add in a requirement that the sketch has to be revealed one shape at a time using mouse clicks.
- Lesson in how to implement a wait function using millis(): Same requirement as above but shapes are revealed as time passes instead of mouse clicks