How many ways and which is the best?

Session 4 - Algorithms

The first part of the session comprised two activities:

1. Using tangrams to teach how the computer can easily misunderstand what is being said and how important it is to give simple,clear instructions. The children enjoyed taking turns in being the computer and programmer. The computer team tried to follow instructions given by the programmer team to construct an object made from tangrams. It taught the smaller children shapes like parallelogram, and also what a hypotenuse of triangle is! After a couple of rounds in trying to get the computer team to understand what the programmer was trying to explain, they were quick and seeing how difficult it was to accomplish even a simple shape!

2.  Paper folding to make 16 rectangles in different ways, finding out which is the best way and why. For some children it was easy to get at the first go while for others it required several tries to come up with alternative ways and then decide which is most efficient.

The computer activity thereafter was from where everyone had left of. Continuing to draw shapes as the Artist, or be the Farmer, the children learnt the concept of repeat blocks, if blocks and the while block. It was interesting to hear the situations in which they would like to use the different blocks. While some children wanted to apply the concept of "efficiency" learnt to make the code shorter, others were happy as long as they cleared the level!