Students will be able to...
- Create static lists in SNAP
- Access elements of a list
- Add and remove elements from a list
- Do Now 4.2: Letters of a Word
- Lab 4.2 handout (You Talkin' to Me?) (Download in Word) (Link to PDF)
- Snap! List Components (Download in Word ), (Download PDF)
- Unit 4 Tips
| Duration | Description |
|---|---|
| 5 minutes | Welcome, attendance, bell work, announcements |
| 15 minutes | Lecture and introduce activity |
| 25 minutes | Grammar Activity |
| 10 minutes | Debrief and wrap-up |
- Lecture
- Review the concept of a list from the previous lesson
- Ask students to brainstorm examples of when lists could be useful
- To store an unknown number of values (e.g. a bunch of student test scores, shopping list, the songs of your favorite music artist)
- To store a collection of related values as one entity (e.g. the number of absent students each day over a week, how often a video on YouTube in a week)
- Ask students to brainstorm examples of when lists could be useful
- Demonstrate creating lists in SNAP
- Use the [Snap! Lists Components] file to demostrate the Snap! list structure
- Use the variadic (taking a variable number of arguments) "list" block to create a simple list
- Point out the format in which lists are displayed (gray box with red elements)
- Show that lists can be assigned to variables like other values
- Emphasize that the list is considered a single value, even though it consists of multiple values
- Point out and explain basic list operations blocks
- The "item," "add," and "delete" blocks will be most important. The "length" block will be useful as well.
- Point out that these blocks all take a list as an argument.
- Share this visual representation of SNAP! Lists [] with your students. Consider posting it in your classroom so students can refer to throughout the unit.
- Review the concept of a list from the previous lesson
- Activity
- Students should complete the "You Talkin' to Me?" activity individually or in pairs
- Encourage students to be creative with their word lists
- Don't allow students to fixate on the exact grammatical correctness of generated phrases and sentences
- If this is a major concern, choose words for the lists such that generated phrases will always be grammatically correct
- Students should complete the "You Talkin' to Me?" activity individually or in pairs
- Debrief
- Ask a student to present and discuss their solution to each step
- Emphasizes uses of lists and encourage students to discuss and think about why lists were necessary
- Ask students to consider if the tasks would have been doable without lists
- Ask a student to present and discuss their solution to each step
- In addition to the bonuses in the lab, advanced students can attempt further extensions of the grammar, including conjunctions, non-transitive verb phrases, and/or recursive rules (e.g. multiple adjectives).
- A more complex context-free grammar for English sentences can be found here: http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~jkalita/work/cs589/2013/12Grammars.pdf.
- Struggling students should focus on generating a noun phrase from only a few words. The other parts of speech and phrase types can be omitted without losing the key learning objectives.
- Non-native English speakers or those with low literacy may struggle with the grammatical concepts here. Since the grammar is not the key objective, feel free to scaffold liberally and/or substitute a different type of grammar.
- Other grammar examples, including arithmetic expressions (which are a good simple substitute) can be found here: https://www.cs.rochester.edu/~nelson/courses/csc_173/grammars/cfg.html.
- You can also provide a grammar cheat sheet with example sentences (example from (Woodward English)
