1.10 Reflecting...

Things we learned about exploring:

• 1. Have a written plan before you start exploring.

  2. Translate your plan into code one step at a time -- test by hitting Play as you translate each little bit.

  3. Some steps that in the plan could be written as a single action will be broken down into multiple instructions or steps in the code.

  4. To make sure you are really understanding what you are exploring, you should be able to make predictions about what a code (or a slight modification to a code) would do before you hit Play. Make a prediction every time you make a change.

  5. Have you noticed how picky the computer is? It does exactly what you tell it.

Sample questions you should be able to answer after this module:

[Q1.10.1]: Watch this movie to the right (with the snowman) and write down the plan that someone might have used to create it.

[Q1.10.2]: If I want to make a beetle spin around 2 times, what would the instruction (method tile) look like in Alice?

[Q1.10.3]: True or False: The order in which items in a Do together block are listed is important (assume no Do in orders are nested inside).

[Q1.10.4]: If I were to drag the big Do together block from our animation to be the very first thing in that method, describe in English how the animation would change.

Final aside about Do in order:

The storyboards that we create in Alice are very often structured mainly as a collection of operations to be executed in order. Because this is the most frequent program structure, Alice assumes that instructions you drag into the program area are to be performed in order - and so you don't need to put a Do in order tile in the code first, as we have done each time in this module. We were just emphasising the point that our instructions were to be performed in order.

As an example of this, the programs in the two screenshots below do exactly the same thing - you'll see one has the enclosing Do in order tile and one doesn't. Note how the colour of the Do in order tile is the same as the colour of the program area surround - confirming that the instructions it contains will be executed in order.