Lesson 14: Until Loops in Maze

Overview

In this lesson, students will learn about until loops. Students will build programs that have the main character repeat actions until they reach their desired stopping point.

Purpose

This set of puzzles will work to solidify and build on the knowledge of loops by adding the until conditional. By pairing these concepts together, students will be able to explore the potential for creating complex and innovative programs.

Agenda

Warm Up (10 min)

Main Activity (30 min)

Wrap Up (15 min)

View on Code Studio

Objectives

Students will be able to:

Build programs with the understanding of multiple strategies to implement conditionals.
Translate spoken language conditional statements and loops into a program.

Preparation

Play through the puzzles to find any potential problem areas for your class.
Make sure every student has a journal.

Vocabulary

Condition - Something a program checks to see if it is true before allowing an action.
Conditionals - Statements that only run under certain conditions.
Loop - The action of doing something over and over again.
Repeat - To do something again.
Until - A command that tells you to do something only up to the point that something becomes true.

Support

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Teaching Guide

Warm Up (10 min)

Introduction

In this lesson, students will be creating loops that only run until a condition is true. Help the students understand how this works by leading them in group activities and having them do an action until some condition is true. For example: Have students touch their nose until you tell them to stop.

Preview of Online Puzzles

Pull up a puzzle from today's Code Studio puzzles. We recommend Puzzle 4.

Ask the class what the bird should repeat to get to the pig.
- The bird should repeat move forward, turn right, move forward, and then turn left.
Ask the class what they can use to repeat this code.
- The bird should repeat this pattern until it reaches the pig.

Fill in the rest of the code using the repeat until loop and press Run. Discuss with the class why this worked.

Main Activity (30 min)

Online Puzzles

Bringing together concepts is not easy, but this set of lessons is meant to help students see the endless possibilities of coding when using conditions. If students struggle at all with understanding the similarities or differences between while loops and until loops, have them try to think of how they would use similar statements in their real lives.

Wrap Up (15 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.