• Learning Goals:
  • Gain more experience in using the list data structure
• Tips:
  • Students may become very creative by embellishing this project with their own choice of costumes and sounds.

• Learning Goals:
  • Deepen understanding of a variable by using a slider to make a variable vary in real time.
• Tips:
  • The context is one example of Islamic artistic design, which requires that the art be based in pure forms, not images of nature.
  • The project ties directly to Unit 1 Lab 3 where pinwheel and rectangle blocks were developed. It could be recommended to students with an interest in art or Islamic culture. You and your students may find Visual Modeling with Logo by James Clayson (MIT Press) an inspiring reference.

Like Tic-Tac-Toe, this is a yearlong project working toward a program that does a good job of guessing. This first step, though, just gives the basics of a user interface for two human players.

• Learning Goals:
  • Use parallelism and inter-sprite communication to display each color, which is handled by a separate sprite. These are steps toward object-oriented programming, about which students who take the AP CS A will learn more next year.
• Tips:
  • Developing an optimal (human) strategy for Mastermind is an interesting, nontrivial task, which students may enjoy, but it's not part of this lab, so feel free to ask students to do that on their own time.

• Learning Goals:
  • Language processing has been one of the classic challenges and stunning successes of computer science. Forty years ago, the idea of a robot like Siri or Amazon Echo that could listen to someone speak, could recognize the words, and could respond usefully was complete science fiction. Computer scientists were certainly working to make it non-fiction, but nothing like it existed. Computers could not even make useful sense out of printed text, let alone spoken words. Today, we almost take tools like that for granted.
  • The reason for mentioning this is that even this small language processing task, though well within the students' capabilities, is challenging. Students analyze the relevant data (words) to find patterns; they subdivide the problem according to those patterns; they use “specialists” to solve specific parts of a problem; and they coordinate those specialized procedures into a solution to the task. The computer science involved is problem decomposition and abstraction.
• Tips:
  • Students, even in high school, may have questions about what is the correct plural or correct way to spell it. Encourage them to check with each other, but also feel free to ask you. Or just ignore words that they're not yet sure about. One side benefit of this project is that it helps students notice how much they do know and take for granted, and how much work it is for a computer to do what humans do naturally! Students may do this kind of activity in another language if they like. The Take It Further suggests one such investigation. It does not scaffold that investigation, but the reasoning and programming are nearly identical. Students might begin with the experiments and, once they know how the Snap! blocks work, skip to the language of their choice instead of doing English plurals.

• Learning Goals:
  • The following rule summaries are for your benefit. Don't teach them to students. The rules, themselves, are of no importance. The point of this project is for students to analyze the data they have to discover regularities in it the way computational linguists do, by making a model, seeing if it works, and fixing it if it does not. Here are some things the specialists must do:
    
    • plural-h needs to recognize words that end with ch and sh so that it can join es to those. To all other words (for example, ones that end with th) we just join s. To do this, plural-h must look at the next-to-last letter of the word.
    • plural-y also needs to look at the next-to-last letter, in this case to see if it is a vowel. To words like day and boy with vowels before the y, we just join s. For the others, like spy and fly, we remove the y and use join to replace it with an i and es.
• Tips:
  • You can best contribute to their debugging of a specialist block they think they've finished just by asking if they have tried hard to find a word that it gets wrong.