Lesson 4.2: Static Lists¶

Learning Objectives¶

Students will be able to…

Duration	Description
5 minutes	Welcome, attendance, bell work, announcements
15 minutes	Lecture and introduce activity
25 minutes	Grammar Activity
10 minutes	Debrief and wrap-up

Ask students to brainstorm examples of when lists could be useful.
To store an unknown number of values (e.g. a bunch of student test scores, shopping list, the songs of your favorite music artist).
To store a collection of related values as one entity (e.g. the number of absent students each day over a week, how often a video on YouTube in a week).
Demonstrate creating lists in Snap!.
- Use the Snap! Lists Components file to demonstrate the Snap! list structure.
- Use the variadic (taking a variable number of arguments) list block to create a simple list.
- Point out the format in which lists are displayed (gray box with red elements).
- Show that lists can be assigned to variables like other values.
- Emphasize that the list is considered a single value, even though it consists of multiple values.
- Point out and explain basic list operations blocks.
- The item, add, and delete blocks will be most important. The length block will be useful as well.
- Point out that these blocks all take a list as an argument.

Students should complete the You Talkin’ to Me? activity individually or in pairs.
Encourage students to be creative with their word lists.
Don’t allow students to fixate on the exact grammatical correctness of generated phrases and sentences.
If this is a major concern, choose words for the lists such that generated phrases will always be grammatically correct.

Ask a student to present and discuss their solution to each step.
Emphasizes uses of lists and encourage students to discuss and think about why lists were necessary.
Ask students to consider if the tasks would have been doable without lists.

In addition to the bonuses in the lab, advanced students can attempt further extensions of the grammar, including conjunctions, non-transitive verb phrases, and/or recursive rules (e.g. multiple adjectives).
A more complex context-free grammar for English sentences can be found here.
Struggling students should focus on generating a noun phrase from only a few words. The other parts of speech and phrase types can be omitted without losing the key learning objectives.
Non-native English speakers or those with low literacy may struggle with the grammatical concepts here. Since the grammar is not the key objective, feel free to scaffold liberally and/or substitute a different type of grammar.
Other grammar examples, including arithmetic expressions (which are a good simple substitute) can be found here.
You can also provide a grammar supplement with example sentences (example from (Woodward English)

Lesson 4.2: Static Lists (TEALS Discourse account required).