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Abstraction is about simplifying things – identifying what’s important without worrying too much about detail.
A school timetable is an abstraction of what happens in a typical week. It shows key information about classes, teachers, rooms and times but ignores further layers of detail such as learning objectives and activities.
Image created by @RobbotResources
Why abstraction important?
Why abstraction important?
Abstraction allows us to think about things to different degrees of detail. It’s a powerful tool in computer science, where it’s used to manage the complexity in much of what’s designed and created.
We can think of abstractions as layers, or boxes within boxes, allowing us to disregard what’s going on inside each of them. Software comprises layers of code, each hiding the complexity of the next. We can see items of hardware as “black boxes”, disregarding their internal workings unless we choose to look deeper.
What does abstraction look like in the curriculum?
What does abstraction look like in the curriculum?
Elementary
Elementary
ELAL
ELAL
Mad Glibs lesson - Lesson Video, Teacher Video, Activity Answer Key, Assessment Answer Key.
Retell stories like The Three Little Pigs, Lion Lessons, Little Red and the Very Hungry Lion with movement and props. Can use a greenscreen.
Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building + Choose a favorite story and share it through different medium: act it out with movement; write reader’s theatre scripts, retell it with your own words and pictures.
How Raven Got His Crooked Nose: An Alaskan Dena'ina Fable + Re-purpose household or found materials to make a raven mask. Talk about what a beak does, what characteristics it needs and what it should look like.
Math
Math
Maps - satellite, political, street view, VR - which maps are best and when?
Stories with a journey can be used to create physical maps and interpret the story into a physical illustration of the story. This is often done for us in adult fiction where maps are included to illustrate the location of events in a book. It is possible for students to create their own map based on what they have read. Examples are Sail away: The Ballad of Skip and Nell and Possum Magic by Mem Fox.
Check out Google Lit Trips.
Middle Years and High School
Middle Years and High School
Without using computers to think about programming, set students the challenge of designing interesting playable games, thinking carefully about the state (typically, board, card deck, die) of their game and its behaviour (the rules or algorithm, according to which play takes place). Students might start by adapting the state and behaviour of games they are already familiar with (X and Os, Nim, Draughts, Pontoon).
In programming, you might ask students to create their own games. If these are based on real world systems then they will need to use some abstraction to manage the complexity of that system in their game. In a simple table tennis game, for example Pong, the simulation of the system’s behaviour includes the ball’s motion in two dimensions and how it bounces off the bat, but it ignores factors such as air resistance, spin or even gravity: the state of the system might be modelled by coordinates to specify the position of the ball and the bats, as well as each player’s score.
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