Intro to Pseudocode

I had the chance to work with a grade 9 class this week to introduce pseudocode to them. Their teacher had a neat idea to start us off: write the steps for tying your shoes. We had several attempts which were not highly successful, and then edited our directions to add more details.

We followed up this task with a video of how to make a peanut butter sandwich.

Finally we started to put some pseudocode in the right order like a puzzle.

once we had the code we debriefed what the instructions meant, and what the key aspects of code are (variables and calculations and what to display on the screen).

This is a nice start to understanding code, and a preview about calculating area and perimeter. It was a fun active lesson with lots of participation and giggles.