I Am Zambia Cirriculum

Lesson 1: Intro (January 14th and 15th)

Link to Lesson:

Intro Lesson: Making a PBJ

Suggestions/Tips:

Feel free to use any other simple tasks in place of making a PBJ. Other tasks could be: drawing a cat on the chalkboard, walking to a certain place in the room, cutting paper into a certain shape etc.

Make sure to take all directions from the students very literal. The students should be slightly frustrated at how specific they need to be with their instructions.

After the activity, make sure to drive home the point that coding requires very specific, line by line, instructions.


Corresponding QuizIt Questions:

The following questions are the same questions students will see when they log into QuizIt at the end of the lesson. Because each lesson is taught over a two day period, there are two questions on QuizIt that correspond to this lesson.

These questions are shown here as a "teacher-check" to ensure that the material asked in the question has been covered in the lesson. Please do not go over the answer to this question during the lesson. We want to see if the students can apply what they learned in class to answer this question.


1. Imagine you are trying to tell the computer how to put a cake in the oven, which of the following is the BEST set of instructions for the computer? (the correct answer is bolded)

    1. Open the oven
    2. Put the pan in the oven
    3. Close the oven door
    1. Put oven mits on
    2. Grab the pan with the uncooked cake batter with both hands
    3. Put the pan in the oven
    4. Close the oven door
    1. Put the cake in the oven
    1. Put oven mits on both hands
    2. Open the oven
    3. Grab the pan with the uncooked cake batter with both hands so that the cake remains facing up
    4. Put the cake pan with the batter on the middle shelf of the oven
    5. Close the oven door
    6. Set a timer for 20 minutes
    5.

2. When dealing with computers, it is important to remember that:

  1. Computers do what they are told and nothing more
    2.
  2. Computers are able to think on their own
  3. The computer will be able to guess what you meant
  4. The computer knows how to "read between the lines"

Additional Practice Questions:

Feel free to go over these questions in class as an "end of lesson review"


True or False: it is important to be very thorough while programming because computers take everything literally.

  1. True
    2.
  2. False