Overview
In this lesson, students work in groups to design aluminum foil boats that will support as many pennies as possible. Groups have two rounds to work on their boats, with the goal of trying to hold more pennies than they did in round 1. The structure of the activity foreshadows different steps of the problem solving process that students will be introduced to in more detail in the following lesson. At the end of the lesson students reflect on their experiences with the activity and make connections to the types of problem solving they will be doing for the rest of the course.
Purpose
This lesson is a fun introduction to the open-ended, collaborative, and creative problem solving students will be using over the rest of this unit and course. The aluminum boats problem could easily be substituted out for any number of other problems that require students to define their goals, devise a plan, try a solution, evaluate their results, and then iteratively improve from there. The fact that the problem chosen is "non-computational" is intentional. Computer science is fundamentally a problem-solving discipline and staying away from traditional computer science problems at this points helps to frame this class as one about problem-solving more generally with computer science being a new "tool" to help attack certain types of problems.
Agenda
CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards
AP - Algorithms & Programming
- 1B-AP-08 - Compare and refine multiple algorithms for the same task and determine which is the most appropriate.
- 1B-AP-11 - Decompose (break down) problems into smaller, manageable subproblems to facilitate the program development process.
- 1B-AP-13 - Take on varying roles, with teacher guidance, when collaborating with peers during the design, implementation and review stages of program development.
