Lesson 5.1: Intro to Cloning¶

Learning Objectives¶

Students will be able to…

Unit 5 Tips
5.1 Slide Deck
Lab 5.1 Handout Connect the Dots (docx) (pdf)
If possible, create large poster-sized versions of the dot grids (each grid is 12 x 3).

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

Inform students that they will be drawing some figures by following specific instructions
Emphasize that students must follow all instructions in the lab carefully
Throughout the activity, ask students to think about other ways they could accomplish the same goals and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Split students into diverse groups of at least six. If the number of students is not an exact multiple of six, create a few groups of seven and have students take turns being “active.”
Students should follow the steps in the lab, being careful to act as a group.
In each part, the group will draw the letter ‘C’ six times, using slightly different instructions.
Students should, hopefully, notice that in part 3, they are able to achieve similar but not exactly the same results by all following the same instructions. (Though each student draws a ‘C’, they are not all in the same location.) In each part, they were able to improve the efficiency and clarity of the instructions.

Ask each group to share their answers to the questions at the end of each part.
Discuss how this approach could be applied to coding.
Introduce the terms prototyping and cloning as (mostly) synonyms:
prototyping: creating a single “master” entity that defines the behavior for a group of objects, then creating many copies of the prototype to duplicate the behavior

Lesson 5.1: Intro to Cloning (TEALS Discourse account required).