Week of April 27th - May 1st, 2020

Quote of the week: "Unless in communicating with a computer one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result" -- Alan Turing

You are going to need to do some planning ahead this week.  The first part of the week you will be working in teams on a MadLib challenge that builds on what you've learned in CodeHS, but allows you to exercise some creativity.  The rest of the week will be spent on CodeHS.  You also have a completion grade for unit 5 next Sunday night, a quiz on unit 5 next Monday, and the 'Getting Started with Machine Learning paper' assignment due next Tuesday.  As of April 23rd, more than half of the students have already completed or almost completed unit 5.  If you've been lagging, now is the time to step up your game. . . if you have something going on in your life that makes this unreasonable, please let me know.

Monday:
We will be working in teams of two on a MadLibs challenge.  I made the teams alphabetically, in case you're wondering. Here they are:

Period 1: 
Ayah and Lucas, Sejal and Paige, Olivia and Lexi, Anna and Devan, Tanya and Katie, Prabhnoor and Eric, Christian and Emily, Megan and Jason, and Jenna and Sharvani.

Period 2:
Isha and Areebah, Chris and Alexa, Filza and Anna, Kareem E. and Jewely-Ann, Kareem H. and Natalia, Aakanksha and Abi, Ishaan and Erin, Jake and Zarin, and Jennifer and Hannah.  

Jenna, Sharvani, Jake, Zarin, Jennifer, and Hannah already have experience with the assignment -- you can ask them for help.

Here is the assignment.  Here is the spreadsheet where each team will enter the URL of their shared repl.  If you don't know what a MadLib is, here's an example.

Tuesday:
Continue working on MadLib with your partner.

Wednesday:
Continue working on MadLib with your partner, if you need the time.  Otherwise, work on CodeHS or the 'Getting Started with Machine Learning paper' assignment.  I will grade your MadLib projects beginning at 5 PM on Wednesday

Thursday, Friday:
Continue with CodeHS.  Remember that there will be a progress grade on unit 5 Sunday evening, and a quiz on Monday.  The 'Getting Started with Machine Learning paper' assignment is due next Tuesday. 
Here is a preview of the unit 5 quiz:

• This quiz has some tricky questions!  Take your time!
• Know how to work with for loops, while loops, and nested loops -- that is, a loop within a loop, like the example below.
• Know how to work with range() with one, two, and three parameters
• Know what break and continue do
• Remember that 'between 5 and 10' does not include the values 5 and 10 unless the word inclusive is used
• Be able to predict what is printed by code like:

       sum = 0
       for i in range(4):
          sum = sum - 5
          for j in range(3):
             sum = sum + 1

       print sum

Week of April 20th - 24th, 2020

Monday - Thursday:
Welcome back!  I hope you had a restful break.  I'd like to do a brief Google video chat first thing today, to just check in with you all, and make sure that everyone understands the 'Getting Started With The Machine Learning Paper' assignment I shared on Friday.

This week we will be carrying on with CodeHS.  I am looking for some ways to mix things up, but we need a little more coding experience first.  I expect everyone to complete unit 4: Conditionals this week.  As in previous weeks, I will do a progress grade on Thursday evening, and there will be a unit quiz on Friday.

A substantial minority of you (10 out of 36) have already completed the modules for unit 4.  I think that's terrific, and I encourage you to carry on.  I promise you that I can find you more good things to do with coding once you have finished CodeHS.

I think it's fair that you all know that CodeHS gives me up-do-date information on your activity.  Here is a snapshot early in first period:

Friday:
Quiz on unit 4.
Be comfortable with expressions like:
    val = True
    print(type(val))
Know how to use if, if/else, if/elif/else
Know how an if statement can be nested in another if statement
Know how to use comparison operators ==, !=,  >=,  >,  <=, and <
Know how boolean expressions can be combined with  and and or
Know how to use round() when comparing floating point numbers

When you're done with the quiz, go ahead and work on unit 5. 

Week of April 6th - 10th, 2020

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday:
Everyone working on CodeHS this week.  I will be doing another completion grade on Wednesday evening.  If you have completed all of Unit 2 and Unit 3 through the end of 3.6 by about 9 PM on Wednesday you will get a 100.  Through 3.5 will get a 95, and so forth.  I see that many of you are well past that already.  If you want to take time to get started on the AI paper while others are catching up, that's fine.

Here are some notes on while loops.  I will be adding various topics to the Google doc as time goes on -- I'll make a note in the blog when there's an update.

Thursday:
CodeHS Quiz on unit 3.  This one is 20 questions, about the same level of difficulty as the last one.  Here are some things you'll want to know:

• how to use input() and print()
• how to use int(), float(), and str()
• How the asterisk * works with strings
• Python arithmetic operations and their PEMDAS precedence
• that dividing an integer by another integer gives you an integer result!

Friday:
Begin Spring Break!  Be well, see you on April 20th!