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  • Writer's pictureMichael Mannix

Is this physics class or CS class?

I have now had two opportunities to begin my semester in honors ninth-grade physics with an abundance of Snap! The first time my students completed a variety of script tasks that got progressively more difficult and exposed them to the basics of Snap! and programming logic. The tasks were not really related to physics or future class work. I felt that was a short-coming of that approach. This semester, I just completed this first phase. This time students created a Snap! script in stages that plots data on a grid and draws a line of best-fit based on user-selected points. The stages of building exposed students to Boolean logic, variables, conditionals, and loops, among other things. In the latter stages, students were interpreting the script, mostly, but occasionally tasked to fill in a key block or two. In the end, the answer to the question is: This is physics class. My hope is the student skill level is sufficient to start our motion unit where most of the Snap! activities will only require small block sequences to be created. Here is the linear data graphing program that culminates the Snap! learning unit. For graphing during the semester, students will use a slightly enhance version of this which can scale data to the Snap! grid.

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Note to Self

I thought today's Snap! assignment would be on-target for student skill level. It was, generally so, but I seem to fall into the same trap of falling short on setting students up for swift success.

Feedback Time

At the end of our first unit about constant-velocity motion, I tasked students to make a sprite move across the display and return to its original position. That was easy for most students. There was

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