Warm Up: The Unplugged Foundation (3 min)

Review Unplugged Activity

This lesson relies on many of the unplugged ideas that students have learned in the weeks leading up to this first online activity. It is important that you bring those concepts (such as persistence, debugging, algorithms, and programs) around full-circle so that your class can benefit from them in their online work as well.

Display: Show students map from the "Happy Maps" exercise that they completed in the lessons prior to this one.

Discuss: Ask students to recall the symbols used in "Happy Maps."

• What happens when the flurb reads the "North" arrow?
• What happens when the flurb reads the "East" arrow?
• What would happen if we made a mistake when programming the Flurb? What if there was a "bug" in our program? Would we throw the whole thing away and start over?

Encourage students to think about the debugging tips:

• Was everything right at the first step?
• How about the second?
• Where did it go wrong?

Transition: Once you are satisfied that your students remember "Happy Maps" and "Unspotted Bugs", you can move into the Bridging Activity.

Online Foundation: Preview Programming in Maze (3 min)

To prepare students, preview an online puzzle (or two) as a class.

Model: Reveal an entire online puzzle from the progression to come. We recommend Lesson 5, Puzzle 5. Point out the "Play Area" with Scrat, as well as the "Work Space" with the Blockly code. Explain that this Blockly code is now the language that students will be using to get Scrat to the acorn. Do they see any similarities to the exercise that they just did? What are the big differences?

Work with your class to drag code into the workspace in such a way that Scrat (eventually) gets to the acorn.

Transition: Students should now be ready to transition to computers to complete online puzzles on their own.

Main Activity (30 min)

Online Puzzles

If you are looking for some extra puzzles to cover with your class, here are some "prediction" puzzles that will allow you to walk through existing code with your students to predict what Scrat will do. It is a good idea to cover them together before letting students loose on their own machines.

Prediction Levels:

• Course B, Programming in Maze #1
• Course B, Programming in Maze #2

Circulate: Teachers play a vital role in computer science education and supporting a collaborative and vibrant classroom environment. During online activities, the role of the teacher is primarily one of encouragement and support. Online lessons are meant to be student-centered, so teachers should avoid stepping in when students get stuck. Some ideas on how to do this are:

• Utilize Pair Programming - Student Video whenever possible
• Encourage students with questions/challenges to start by asking their partner
• Unanswered questions can be escalated to a nearby group, who might already know the solution
• Remind students to use the debugging process before you approach
• Have students describe the problem that they’re seeing. What is it supposed to do? What does it do? What does that tell you?
• Remind frustrated students that frustration is a step on the path to learning, and that persistence will pay off
• If a student is still stuck after all of this, ask leading questions to get the student to spot an error on their own

Wrap Up (5 - 10 min)

Journaling

Having students write about what they learned, why it’s useful, and how they feel about it can help solidify any knowledge they obtained today and build a review sheet for them to look to in the future.

Journal Prompts:

• Draw one of the Feeling Faces - Emotion Images that shows how you felt about today's lesson in the corner of your journal page.
• Draw Scrat and an acorn somewhere on your paper. Can you write a program to get to get Scrat to the acorn?

Extended Learning

In small groups, let students design their own mazes on paper and challenge other students or groups to write programs to solve them. For added fun, make life-size mazes with students as Scrat and the acorn.