Teaching Materials
What is new in this level?
Level 1 is where students write and run their very first lines of code. There is no punctuation to worry about yet: every line starts with a command and the rest of the line is plain text. The lesson is really about one idea, that a computer does exactly what you tell it to do, no more and no less.
New in this level:
- Showing text on the screen with
print - Asking a question with
askand using the reply withanswer - Drawing with the turtle using
forwardandturn - Playing a musical note with
play
- Slides Present the level, one concept at a time
- Workbook Exercises to print, away from the screen Work in progress
Common mistakes
Students forget to type commands
For example they type a sentence without using print.
Hedy can't print this
Teach your students to always start a line of code with a command.
print Hedy can print this!
Students use capitals when typing commands
Commands won't work if they are in capitals.
Ask Why does my code fail? Print Because I'm using capitals.
Remove the capitals.
ask Why does my code work now? print Because I removed the capitals!
Students use answer without ask
answer is made to repeat an answer after an ask command. Without ask answer won't do anything.
print Your name is answer
Add an ask command to make it work.
ask What's your name? print Your name is answer
Turtle: Students let the turtle walk off of the screen
Often students love to try out big numbers when using the turtle, which causes the arrow to walk off the screen.
forward 300 turn 90
In the example, students tend to think that the turn command failed; even though it did what it what supposed to. What happened is the turtle walked past the screen limits. Use smaller numbers to prevent this from happening.
forward 100 turn 90
Turtle: Students use the command backward, but there's no such command.
Backward is not a command.
backward 100
To make the turtle go backwards, you use the forward command and a negative number. For example:
forward -100