Lesson 14

Talent Show!

In this lesson, students discover that individual sprites may run more than one program concurrently. They will pick a sprite, and have it do two or more things simultaneously as a talent show act.

Agenda

    • Warm-up: Guess the Program (5 minutes)
    • Main Activity: Initialize sprites with Start on Green Flag, Go Home. Select a background. Program one sprite to run two or more Start on Green Flag programs simultaneously to showcase its amazing talents. See lesson plan for mild, medium, and spicy extensions. (20 minutes)
    • Debrief: What can you program Scratch Jr. sprites to do that you can't program a Bee-Bot to do? Student project showcase. (5 minutes)

Materials

  • Tablets: 1-2 per pair of students

Vocabulary

  • blocks - a visual unit of code
  • initialize - to set a computer program to a starting position, value, or configuration
  • parallelism - running several sets of instructions at the same time. (Definition from Scratch Jr. Coding Cards.)
  • sprite - a virtual object, animal, or person that a programmer controls with code

Standards

  • CA CSS K-2. DA. 7 - Store, copy, search, retrieve, modify, and delete information using a computing device, and define the information stored as data.
  • CA CSS K-2. AP. 14 - Develop plans that describe a program’s sequence of events, goals, and expected outcomes.
  • CA CSS K-2. AP. 15 - Give attribution when using the ideas and creations of others while developing programs.
  • CA CSS K-2. AP. 16 - Debug errors in an algorithm or program that includes sequences and simple loops.
  • CA CSS K-2. AP. 17 - Describe the steps taken and choices made during the iterative process of program development.