Lesson Plan Ideas by Type

Creating lesson plans are time consuming for teachers. This page attempts to organize the large numbers of lesson plans and ideas submitted by past SGD teachers.

If you have a successful, easy to execute lesson plan to share, email it to [mailto:yasko.endo@colorado.edu Yasko Endo, project manager] for inclusion on this page (or send her a link to your Teacher Page if this is where you store your plans).

AP Computer Science Lesson
Rufus Miller

Language Objective: Read the documentation on the colorChange project and write out psuedo code to break down the project into understandable modules.

Content Objective: Use Agentsheets to create agents, worksheets and code to simulate the process of how collisions can cause color change (deterioration) in certain objects.

Key Vocabulary: conditional tests, loops, collisions, counters, random, increments and applets.

Educational value: Introduction of random numbers is pivotal in the understanding of how simulation processes work. The following lesson is a brief detour in the AP curriculum to allow students to work with an alternative programming environment. Using Agentsheets is great way to exhibit conditional if statements, methods, use of variables, incrementing loops and random movement.

Lesson Sequence: •	Introduce Agentsheets, fundamentals of creating worksheets, agents and behaviors. •	Solve the problem of the colorChange applet. •	Post Applets to http://www.alhswebdesign.org

Steps to follow: 1.	After creating the test projects which are designed to introduce you Agentsheets and its various areas, create a new project called colorChange. 2.	Create 2 agents: carpet (for the floor), blocks (plain squares, any color). 3.	Create a worksheet with carpet as the base, leaving white obstacles for limiting the collisions. 4.	Add rules to the block agent so that it moves randomly on the carpet. 5.	Create a collision method that is called continuously. 6.	The collision method should check for a block neighbor and change that color from white to red (White = 0, Red = 1000). 7.	Create a way for the simulation to start over without using the stop or play buttons. 8.	Post to the network share for an evaluation.

Web Design Lesson
Rufus Miller

Language Objective: After playing the games of Frogger and Sokoban, write out an explanation of how each character or agent will interact in the game environment.

Content Objective: Create the games of Frogger and Sokoban using Agentsheets and the examples of conditional statements with methods.

Key Vocabulary: conditional tests, agents, loops, collisions, absorption, random and applets.

Educational value: Computational thinking builds on the power and limits of computing processes, whether they are executed by a human or by a machine. Computational methods and models give us the ability to solve problems and design solutions that make sense.

Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing solutions, and understanding behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Computational thinking includes a range of techniques that use simple everyday methods that have direct correlations to the field of computer science. Having to solve a particular problem, we might ask: What’s the best way to solve it?

Computational thinking is redefining a seemingly difficult problem into one we know how to solve using simulation. It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem or modeling the relevant aspects of a problem to make it a simple representation of something we have experience with. The game of Frogger represents a familiar scenario that can be simulated using computational methods provided by the Agentsheets interface.

Supplemental Materials: Online links to the Frogger and Sokoban tutorials.

Lesson Sequence: •	Introduce Agentsheets, fundamentals of creating worksheets, agents and behaviors. •	Provide students with the Frogger tutorial. •	Post Applets to http://www.alhswebdesign.org •	Provide students with Sokoban tutorial. •	Post Applets to http://www.alhswebdesign.org