Lesson 10: Programming (input and output)

 April 16th, 2021

Welcome back everybody! Today we are going to be talking about Programming!! Knowing how to program now a days is quite useful as today's society is relying more and more on technology each day. Therefore, it is really important for future educators to know about different tools that utilise technology in order to make classes more interactive and modern for students. This lesson we covered the introduction to programming for kids using Primary Code. 

Primary Code is a program that allows us to teach primary school students the basic knowledge necessary for introducing them to programming. it has four main menus: input and output, sequences, conditionals and loops. For this lesson we focused more on input and outputs. For the input and output section in Primary Code, we first have to enter the application and select a language. Then, select fruits or plasticine, they will be able to select the fruits and colours they would like with the mouse. Then, it will ask for your name where the students need to type out their own. In the menu you will select either I or O which refer to the input versus the output. 

• Output: for the first step, the students will learn how we manage to introduce message to the computer so it shows on the screen, the screen being the main output. this will be done using variables, which are basically the small boxes that show up where you can keep things from your computer. The name of the student would be considered the variable. In the figures below we can observe the different types of variables to practice with.

They will also be able to select two different variables where they can put them in the same line or different lines as we can see in the next photos:

• input: the input refers to the message that is written from the keyboard and it is stored, however not directly shown as before. In this case, in the figure below, the message is stored in a variable as it is not really shown in the screen directly. It is written from the keyboard, through typing. We can observe two examples of this down below:

Later on in the lesson, we started talking about scratch. Scratch is another program that we can utilise for programming when they are more aware of the topic. Scratch is really easy to use as all of the different options are named properly and can be understood in an easy way once students are aware about what variables are. In scratch we have to make use of the different, costumes, sounds, the green flag in order to start and the red button for stopping it. There is a place to put the different inputs on and then the left screen where we are able to see the output. We make use of the items on the left in order to create variables, hide them, etc. And there are lots of different projects you can follow. 

In the images below we can observe the different projects we created in class when we were first introduced to Scratch. 

As one can observe from the examples above, we can use Scratch in order to move and create different stories. We can make use of the student in order to interact with them and get a response. Also, we can make loops and different variables in order to create a story. What we will do in later lessons is to create a collective scratch story about our didactic unit, the water cycle. Overall, this class was really helpful as we learned a lot about programming that we did not know before. It is crucial to understand these types of concepts for the future in order to make interactive lessons for these students. They are also quite important due to the fact that now a days technology is going to become more and more important each day so it is crucial for students to understand more about it.