Introduction

We would suggest asking the students to work in pairs for this lesson to encourage discussion and reasoning in their instructions.

You may also want to take whiteboards and pens or paper and pencils to the ICT room for the children to plan out their ideas for their algorithms.

 

Recap on the last lesson and what they learned about Logo:

• How do we make the turtle move with Logo?
• Demo adding forward but don’t put a number in - Why won’t this work?
• Add a Fd and number but miss out the space - Why won’t this work?
• How do we do a quarter turn? How many degrees is this?
• How can we do a smaller turn?

Remind them about using the grid as a guide for the size of forward/backward commands.

 

 

In the last lesson, we drew simple shapes like squares and rectangles. Ask them to discuss with a partner the commands they would need to use to draw a letter ‘L’ . Discuss their suggestions. Depending on their answers you might need to highlight where the best place to start would be, and therefore, what the first command should be (most likely is that you’ll need to make the robot turn so it is facing the correct direction before starting to draw the letter) Try out their suggestions to draw the ‘L’.

 

 

We added one instruction at a time last week. Show how we can write more than one instruction at once, or even the full algorithm in one go, by separating commands with spaces before pressing enter. Model this for the ‘L’. Here's one example solution:

 

 

 

Encourage them to try adding more than one instruction at a time in the activities this week.

If we wanted to write a simple word with the turtle how could we solve that problem? Discuss that there are a lot of steps to think about but that breaking it down into smaller jobs can make it easier, we can call this decomposing the problem. What do we need to think about?

• The size of the letters
• Where to start on the screen so it all fits, and in the correct place for the first letter. 
• Some letters will be easier than others! - Straight lines and 90 corners make letter easier to draw.

There are some examples on the lesson slides that show the letters that can be created with only 90-degree turns and straight lines.

 

 

Some children might be able to write their own three-letter word as well. They are allowed to pick up their screen turtle and drag it to the correct start position for each letter. 

 

 

Main task

Ask them to have a go at programming their robot to write a simple three letter word, for example:

• CAT
• PET
• HIM
• ATE
• COW

You may want the students to work in pairs for this task to encourage discussion and reasoning in their instructions. Encourage them to try and write a few instruction in one go, where possible. 

 

 

Plenary

Review their work at the end. What was difficult? Which bits were easier? Why?

Who managed to add more than one instruction at a time? Did anyone manage to write a full algorithm for a letter before trying it out? How did you debug any mistakes?