usually a teacher will read that big
math problem in the beginning of the
lesson and think that their students
aren't quite ready for it and it's true
they're not quite ready that's why you
need to take that big complicated
problem and break it up into smaller
pieces
by giving them the power to do it on
their own it'll teach them how capable
they are of solving things that they
would have otherwise thought are just
too hard
okay
so has anybody ever had a problem
that is so big
that it seems like you cannot do it by
yourself
how about
cleaning your room
right has your mom ever told you to go
in and clean your room and you're like
oh
yeah
but what if your mom says hey go in and
put your clothes in a pile does that
seem so hard
or go in and pick up your books is that
so hard yes
no sometimes i don't even read books
but you can get to the exact same place
doing little steps at a time right
so that's what our lesson is going to be
about today we're going to learn
about computational thinking
so to start out
i'm going to ask you
to add some numbers in your head you
said you all know addition right
okay here we go
i want you to add
the numbers
from 1 to 200 in your head ready go
you have 30 seconds
add all the numbers from 1 to 200 in
your head
okay go
okay is anybody done yet
so how far did you get
one plus 200 plus 199
plus 198
okay
so not quite all the way
was that such a big problem for any of
you that you didn't even try
no
yeah
so does anybody think they have the
actual answer
it was kind of a hard problem huh
what we were doing is we were adding one
plus two
that's what we were trying to do right
that's a lot to do in your head isn't it
but what if i taught you a trick
that helped you do it in your head
so the first thing is
add the numbers from 1 to 200 all in
your head in 30 seconds
great
that's hard that's a big problem our
first step
was to take that big problem
and break it down into little steps
right
and then the next thing we can do
is we can look for patterns
so does anybody see a pattern
you guys both do what's the pattern so
um
um if you add like one plus 200 then
you'll get on 201 and then if you keep
going like two plus 199 you'll get 201
too and then if you have two plus
if you have three plus
198 you get 201. does anybody see that
pattern
yeah
so you have
201 201 201
how many of these are you going to have
um
make you've got two hundred and half
which is one hundred and then multiply
two hundred and one times one hundred
can i just tell you
that you guys all did that in your head
right
so what does that equal
well
thank you
so
you guys just took a big scary problem
you broke it down
you found a pattern
you put it together into an algorithm
that you could solve
you did it all in your head
and if you were to do this again it
would only take you less than 30 seconds
i guarantee you
these are skills that you guys can
actually use on every problem for the
entire rest of your life
and you're gonna notice if someone hands
you a big problem and you go oh wait a
week that's a big problem
how can i break it up into smaller
problems
and then solve one at a time until i
figure it all out
you're going to be the smartest kids in
your class
you're going to be the smartest people
at your workplace you're going to be the
smartest bosses that ever ran a company
because you'll be unstoppable
so
we're going to learn how to practice
that
okay so i'm going to show you how to do
this okay
so there's three different stories
you need to go through the stories
and wherever they have the same word in
the same place
you circle it
and wherever the words are different
you cross them out or underline them
okay
and then at the end we're going to write
down all the things that are the same
and wherever there was something
different you're going to have a blank
so you're kind of going to make your own
almost a mad lib do you guys know what
mad libs are
yeah okay
so go ahead and get started and i'll
walk around and help you in case you get
stuck
there is an obvious pattern and teachers
like to make sure that the kids pick up
on it but it's enough for the kids to
come up with their own thoughts based on
the game so if this group comes up with
a different game than this group it's
perfectly okay just have them explain
their reasoning and let them know where
they succeeded or where they could use a
little help
so read it out loud to me
i chose a blank and rolled a blank
then a blank then a blink that means i
need to draw a blank blank on my blank
okay
so now you have to figure out
how to play the game
based on what you just wrote
so i chose a blank
and they said lion donkey and puppy and
so i can make them so what do you think
is the first thing you need to do
i chose a
you can choose any of them you want
okay
so now you know your first step of your
game
okay
and then i rolled a blank a blank and a
blank so how many times do you think you
have to roll the dice
very good so now make up your own rules
of the game based off of the
instructions
so now
what we're going to do is we're going to
think about the game that we just played
you had a big problem
you had to figure out how to make
directions to this game
and you needed to break it down into
little bits
which you did by having three different
stories
you had to find patterns
and what were the things that were
patterns
what were those yeah
right so there were some things that
were the same in every story and you
circled them right
then we had to use abstraction
which was taking out all the details
because the things that were different
we wanted to just ignore that until we
were ready to create our own story so
what did we do
we crossed it out right
and we made an underline there so we
ended up with words and underlines that
let us make our own story
and that became our algorithm for
creating rules to our game
so this is what we do in computer
science all the time
we find big problems we pull them apart
to see what things are the same and what
things are different and then based on
what we find out
we can create a solution that works for
everything