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Introduction Video

Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions/Activities
  • What are some conditionals involving everyday IF-THEN situations (as in discussed in page 207) that you can construct that relate to topical issues for students in your classroom or in the public discourse (such as climate change), or issues of equity and social justice?
    • Encourage students to create their own and use them as discussion topics related to issues affecting students’ lives.
    • Encourage students to connect multiple issues related to a topic through the use of Boolean operators.
  • Our learning goals for various concepts vary according to the context of our students and classrooms— the grade/age of our students, the learning setting, prior experience, etc. Which of the following learning goals related to conditionals do you address in your teaching? What pedagogy do you adopt to address these? Which ones are problematic for your students, and in what way? How do you address student difficulties?
    C0Conditionals involve making a choice of what command/instruction or set of commands/instructions should be executed
    C1A conditional is based on a “condition”—an expression that evaluates to True or False
    C2There can be instructions defined for True and/or False outcomes (but only one or the other will be executed) creating “branches of code”
    C2aThis is achieved through the IF-THEN, and IF-THEN-ELSE kind of constructs
    C2bIt is meaningless for both branches to have the same code/set of instructions
    C3Expressions in a conditional can involve relational and/or Boolean operators that evaluate to a Boolean TRUE OR FALSE
    C3aMultiple expressions in a conditional can be combined into a compound expressions (for example (score < 500 OR lives > 0)
    C4Conditionals can be used within loops
    C5Conditionals can be nested (this is equivalent to creating a conditional with a compound expression using the Boolean AND operator)
    C6Students should be able to trace execution based on conditionals
  • The following some known  naive conceptions are related to understanding of conditionals. Which of these have you encountered in your teaching? Are there others? How do check if students are harboring these naive misconceptions? How do you address them? What pedagogies/strategies do you adopt?
    The conditions in IFs are continuously checked by the system; the moment the condition is true, the conditional is executed
    Both branches of an if statement are executed
    If the condition of an IF-statement is false, the execution of the whole program stops
Discussion/Reflection Qs contributed by Dr. Christine Liebe (CSTeach Course, Colorado School of Mines)
  • What was the best way that you learned to apply conditionals?
  • What are some fun popular games you could use to teach conditionals (e.g., “Bool Says” instead of Simon/e Says)?
  • How could you use graphic novels or choose your own adventure stories to teach conditionals?
  • What are some ways you could scaffold solving a problem like Fizz Buzz to help students develop logical thinking?
  • What words in programming problems should you interpret that would allow students to more easily solve problems computationally?

Additional Resources

INFACT unplugged, digital, and programming activities suite

Drs. Shuchi Grover, Maya Israel, and David Weintrop collaborated as Co-PIs with the Edge @ TERC group to design Including Neurodiversity in Foundational and Applied Computational Thinking (INFACT).
INFACT engages students in grades 3–8 in problem solving through computational thinking (CT). INFACT involves a variety of on- and off-line CT learning and teaching materials, including games (e.g., Zoombinis), coding, robotics, and hands-on unplugged activities. INFACT is specially designed for inclusive classrooms, integrating supports for executive function within the CT activities. Recent US Department of Education (USEd) funded research showed students who use INFACT show  more improvement on CT assessments than those using other CT programs. This outcome was particularly dramatic for students who face challenges with executive function.

Graphical abstract of INFACT. "Computational thinking teaching and learning materials designed for inclusion show promise to reveal problem solving strengths of neurodivergent learners."

Sample assessments for probing understanding of conditionals

Assessment #1

Coming Soon