What a great start to the new school year! My classes, both fifth and sixth grade, learned about our curriculum. First up on our list we focused on abstraction. Abstraction is part of the computational thinking section of the Digital Literacy and Computer Science standards.
I started by drawing a 🏚, writing the word "house," and how these symbols represent the idea of a house but not the physical house. Then we practiced another form of abstraction, sign language. Ask them to show you how to use sign language to ask to use the bathroom. Finally, we got down to the nitty gritty as we moved on to binary code, also known as base 2, 1s and 0s, or machine language, the most basic form of computer language.
Students learned about bits (1 binary digit), nibbles (a set of 4 bits), and bytes (a set of 8 bits) before creating and using a Flippy Do to help them convert between binary, base 2, numbers and the more familiar decimal, base 10 number system.
With some practice and investigation into patterns while we used the Flippy Do they were ready to move on to the next activity, finding their assigned seats. I refer to our classroom as "The Motherboard." The rows around the room are named after computer, things. On Hard Drive you will find our storage section filled with crayons, paper, hanging folders and more. My rolling desk is located at Variable Terrace is its location much like a variable can change. For this exercise each student converted 2 bytes, one for their location and the other for a partner. They used a map of our room to match their number to the street location before checking in with a partner to compare notes and help each other if corrections were needed. Currently they are grouped together by home room or team.
| Conversion | The Motherboard |
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Stay tuned for future updates. On deck, secret messages using UPPERCASE alphabet bytes and then algorithms, another focus of the computational thinking strand of our state standards. Don't forget to bookmark my page for future reference.
