"What's an algorithm?" I asked my friend Tanya, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. "It's a recipe," she said. That was several years ago and simplicity of her answer has stayed with me. When Facebook's algorithms do strange things to newsfeeds it's because somebody tweaked the recipe. I can get my brain around that! Of course, with Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithms can now tweak algorithms, too, but we'll leave that dizzying thought for another day.
It took the special brilliance of math specialist Charyl Hills at Goodnoe Elementary in Newtown, Pennsylvania to see the dance steps in the MathStart story Bug Dance (Level 1, Directions) as a recipe—an algorithm—that could be used to teach kindergarteners coding. The kids learned to program Bee-Bots, adorable little robot bees, to zoom around the floor moving forward, backward, left and right.
"They're doing it, Mrs. McCusker!" exclaimed one little coder with the special mix of awe and delight that comes from seeing that a recipe actually works!
Calling all Bee-bots, Teachers, Kindercoders! Let's do the dance together! "Wiggle to your left! Wiggle to your right!
It took the special brilliance of math specialist Charyl Hills at Goodnoe Elementary in Newtown, Pennsylvania to see the dance steps in the MathStart story Bug Dance (Level 1, Directions) as a recipe—an algorithm—that could be used to teach kindergarteners coding. The kids learned to program Bee-Bots, adorable little robot bees, to zoom around the floor moving forward, backward, left and right.
"They're doing it, Mrs. McCusker!" exclaimed one little coder with the special mix of awe and delight that comes from seeing that a recipe actually works!
Calling all Bee-bots, Teachers, Kindercoders! Let's do the dance together! "Wiggle to your left! Wiggle to your right!