Author: Suzanne Reed irc: zanarama June 24, 2013
-Goal Statement- The goal of AmazingTurtle is to create a set of mazes, puzzles, and lessons to introduce Python programming to middle school students with no prior coding experience that can be taught by teachers with no coding experience.
-Background- The concept for AmazingTurtle stems from my time introducing Python Turtle to middle school students for Honors Volunteering hours at RIT. Each group of students was taught over two 45 minute lessons. The first consisted of an introduction to some programming concepts and a tutorial on Turtle commands. The second day was a review of the concepts and commands, and then a maze challenge where students all worked to control the Turtle in a maze, collecting stars and earning candy for their efforts.
The classes were very successful with students staying engaged and beginning to gain some skills, including debugging their own mistakes. The greatest success of my time teaching were the students that took their own time to learn more by downloading Python on their home computers, taking time after school to meet with me, and continuing to email me with questions. Many students also requested more puzzles and challenges.
-Current Resources- Right now there is a very simple maze built with three stars and a home base. Students attempted to collect all of the stars and return to the home base while adhering to these rules:
1. You many not resize the window.
2. The turtle may not leave the window.
3. The turtle may not cross its own path.
4. The turtle must change to the color of any star that it touches.
5. The turtle may not touch anything other than stars and the home block.
Students solved the maze in solution.py. Solutions must be manually checked for completion by a teacher. There is also a basic Cheat Sheet of Turtle commands that are needed to solve the maze, as well as some 'fun' commands that helped peak student interest. A major challenge of these puzzles is that some students had difficulties with spelling commands, and with understanding angle measures.
-Development Possibilities- This project is very open ended. Development is not limited to ideas listed.
1. Teacher guides to teaching Python Turtle lessons.
2. 'Circular' grade-level curriculums that will build each year
3. Grade level puzzles and mazes as fun/practice.
4. Higher level programming challenges that will teach higher level
concepts through Turtle. (Ex: variables, loops)
5. Setup instructions for installing Python at home, easy enough for a
student, but also include information for parents.
6. Self-checking mechinism to test for challenge completion.
-Contact Us- Have an idea? Have a question? If you are an educator, coder, or just interested in helping out please contact us!