This is the third year in a row that I’ve taught my One Really Good Lesson™ and forgotten to take pictures. After we take care of boring procedural things, the first things that we do in programming class is have a picnic.
It’s usually blasted hot at the start of school so we have the picnic in the air-conditioned commons. But this year the weather has been relatively nice, so I setup two tables under a tree in a little courtyard area that we have. I spread out traditional checkered tablecloths on the tables (pushed together to make one big square table) and made things look nice. The students went to our normal classroom and found these instructions on the board:
Go South.
Bring chair.
Once everyone is there, I spread out all the tools and fixins to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and tell them that I would be glad to make sandwiches for them if only they would tell me how.
I play the “oh so literal” computer, and they learn things like precision, thinking ahead, looping, procedures and other programming things. I didn’t get as messy this year as I usually do.