1. Students can identify and document high level data requirement for their game
2. Students can properly name and code global variables in blocks format in App Inventor
Students will use previous requirements documents to identify high level data needs, associate those needs with variables, and code those variables into their game using blocks coding.
Activity 4.11d.1 (Budget 25 minutes)
Students complete Data Requirements Worksheet
1. Teacher leads a discussion on using existing game requirements documents to identify data requirements. While this isn't the only data that will be required, it is good to get these high-level requirements identified up front so they can be put in the code and tracked. Teacher may want to discuss that very frequently "requirements gathering and documentation" is its own job in the software industry, but for small teams like our it is often lumped in with software development.
2. Students complete the Data Requirements Worksheet, using the Example Data Requirements, and Data Requirements for SneakerCollective as a guide. This should be straightforward for students, and there may be repetition between sections, for example it is no surprise that we want to display the victory condition data or score for the user. In the example provided one thing that may not be obvious is that we can't know if all the students have been picked up unless we know (a) how many students there are, and (b) how many students have been picked up. If (a) == (b), then we have victory. So you need both (a) and (b) as variables. NOTE: we will handle conditionals in the next unit, right now we are just looking to make sure students have the necessary variables.
Activity 4.11d.2 (Budget 25 minutes)
Structured Play: students add data elements to their blocks code.
1. Students are given 30 minutes to play in App Inventor, with the following requirements that the teacher should be able to model for the students.
(1) students add whatever data elements are required from their worksheet as global variables in the AppInventor code, and assign them starting values -- SneakerCollective "TimeToCollect" is the global variable for how many seconds it takes to collect all the sneakers.
(2) students display the starting values of at least one variable to the canvas -- SneakerCollective converts seconds into minutes and seconds, using the "globalTimeText" for the string to display, and the custom procedure "convertToTime" to convert "TimeToCollect" into the string "globalTimeText". Students/Teacher can just display "TimeToCollect" if desired.
4.11d.1 Data Requirements Worksheet (Student Worksheet)
4.11d.2 Example Data Requirements (Student Example)
4.11d.2 Data Requirements for SneakerCollective (Student Example)