TKP Tips: Teaching the SmallBasic CONNECT THE DOTS recipe
The parts of the CONNECT THE DOTS recipe are as follows:
1) Recipe – guided line-by-line translation, to teach core concepts. For the core recipe of Dots, you are several concepts that will be new to your students. Also this is one of the first recipes in the library that does not use the ‘drawing’ (i.e. Tortoise.Move, Tortoise.Turn, etc..) metaphor. Here, rather you will introduce Events and the ShapeMaker API. The cheat sheet for the core recipe is QWB852. Below is the teacher video for the core recipe.
2) Variation – instructor – led verbal refactoring and modifications to add concepts to the solution. In this variation we build on the initial event-handling logic introduced in the core recipe by working with the event intervals. We also sometimes ‘play’ the other objects on the screen, such as the text, the size or color of the dots, etc….
3) Recap – presented by the instructors, re-do the recipe to reinforce core concepts. You’ll want to particularly emphasize common mistakes with event-handling syntax.
4) Quiz – facilitated–pairs reach 100% mastery by working together. Remember to do a recap, instructors repeating the recipe BEFORE you get the kids started with the quiz. There is no quiz for this recipe at this time.
5) Homework – There is no homework for this recipe at this time.
6) Xtras – There are no Xtras at this time
We are really excited about the growth of TKP. We welcome feedback on the how we can make these videos better for you as TKP teachers.
Happy teaching!