Conference Reminders

Before our student lead conference one of my students, Sue, spent some time answering questions about the code that Ben had come up with. The questions involved the use of parameters. I have introduced this to them but I think I will need to do a better job of introducing and revisiting this each year.

screen-shot-2016-10-18-at-2-23-25-pm
Rotating Polygons

I am, again, going to look at this via line design.

With my grade six class I started by playing with blocks like the Rotating Polygons image. I would change the inner loop to create a different polygon then change the outer loop to change the number of times the inner loop rotated. The the kids played with these blocks to see what would happen.

A few days later we started looking at the relationship between the number of turns and the turn angle. Using the pattern they found between the number of sides and the turn angle my next step will be to look at creating a polygon block using more blocks.

We will look at what could be created with more blocks and create a pentagon block and add this to the same code as shown in the Rotating Polygons image above. The pentagon block is a first step and next we will create a block that uses the parameter number of sides. This will then let them create a polygon block that can create any type of regular polygon.

one parameter

 

Next step will be to let them know that they can pass multiple parameters through when they create a block and suggest that they create another parameter that handles the rotation of the polygon.

Hopefully they will come up with something like this.

twirl

Maybe someone will ask about the length of a side and wonder if  that can also be added as a parameter. If not it will be a question I will leave with them.

Maybe a question like this. How could make this?

What did this have to do with Sue’s question? Next…