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Who wants to be a millionaire?

This lesson sequence uses the well-known wheat/rice and chessboard problem as students use spreadsheets to simulate iteration and to solve problems.

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Visual to text coding: Lesson 2

This is the second in a series of lessons to transition from visual coding to text-based coding with a general-purpose programming language. This lesson may take two to three 45-minute periods. It introduces how to make decisions (branching) and identify data types.

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Pencil code program: Lady MacBeth Chat Bot

Use this program to create an interactive chat bot who answers questions as if she is Lady Macbeth. Have students analyze, fill in or change parts of, or use the program to create their own variation and rendition of a character. This program could be used to further your understanding of how you could use Pencil Code in ...

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Sphero maze

This lesson will explore how to program the Sphero using functions and show the benefits of decomposing the behaviour of the Sphero into functions, instead of writing line by line repeated behaviours. This lesson idea was created by Claudia Szabo.

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Makey Makey Orchestra

In this learning sequence students explore an orchestra and use Makey Makey to make a musical instrument for an ensemble.

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Rock, Paper, Scissors AI!

In this lesson we use the game rock, paper scissors to investigate how an AI can recognise your hand gestures. Firstly students create, train and test their own AI model. They import their AI model into a pre-made JavaScript program to modify the computer program to incorporate game play. The level of game play will depend ...

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Design Thinking Process - Empathising

In this lesson students understand design thinking as a process for solving problems creatively. Students explore the design thinking process of empathising and seek to understand more about the users and the problem they are trying to solve. This particular lesson explores reducing litter through the design brief although ...

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Pencil code program: Chaos game

The ‘chaos game’ is a way to see how patterns can result from certain random events. Use this program to run the chaos game, randomly moving the turtle to create a pattern. Have students analyse or fill in or change parts of the pencil code program.

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Ciphering a sentence

A cipher is a message that has been written in such a way (encoded) that it is unreadable by others. In this lesson, students will use mapping to encode a sentence. Students will work with a partner to create an algorithm that describes the encryption process. They will also examine encoded and decoded messages to recognize ...

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Home automation programming (yrs 5-6)

Investigate home automation systems, including those powered by artificial intelligence (AI) with speech recognition capability. These suggested activities provide a level of differentiation to cater for students’ range of programming skills. They were developed in collaboration with the Digital Technologies Institute.

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Programming LED circuit with Arduino IDE

In this lesson students will be using components of the LilyPad development kit to create a circuit of LED’s that are controlled using a basic Arduino program, written in the Arduino IDE. Starting with a simple sequence of turning a LED on and off, the students can be challenged to choose a piece of music with a steady ...

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Turtles: exploring data tracking turtle movements

By gathering data on marine turtles, scientists have evidence that helps them work out where turtles migrate and the journeys they take. Scientists can then help to reduce the threats to the turtles’ survival. In this lesson we look at satellite tracking using real scientific data. Explore ways to model, interpret, represent ...

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Data compression

Students will learn how the information in a pixel can be manipulated to change the image, and apply a bitmask filter to an image to remove some information and reduce the memory size of the file. Finally, students will modify the filter to find a balance between quality and small file size. Based on the original lessons ...

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Visual to text coding: Lesson 7

This is the seventh in a series of lessons to transition from visual coding to text-based coding with a General Purpose Programming language. This lesson may take two to three 45-minute periods. It introduces iteration (also called loops).

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AI ethics - What's possible, probable and preferred?

The development and ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence raise a number of social and ethical matters that students can explore in the Digital Technologies classroom. This lesson idea outlines a project to help students frame such discussions using the curriculum Key Idea of Creating preferred futures, tying into Critical ...

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How can AI recognise what it sees?

This lesson is an introduction to the way in which a computer sees. It focuses on image recognition that involves feature extraction, object detection and classification. This lesson was developed in collaboration with Dr Karsten Schulz, Digital Technologies Institute.

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Note the music

We can program a computer to play music. Conventionally this is done by hard coding, which is the process of coding all possible expected behaviours. Alternatively, we can train an artificial intelligence (AI) computer about what notes go well with others, so it can play a duet with a human musician. Students can make their ...

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Can AI guess your emotion?

Discuss emotions as a class, and introduce the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). This lesson can also be used to introduce image classification – a key application of AI. Developed in collaboration with Digital Technologies Institute.

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Check out the checkout

This sequence of lessons explores how to incorporate user input, decision-making and loops in programming using the context of a shopping experience, particularly the checkout. It combines data in the form of a barcode and programming choices.

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Scratch Creative Computing Guide

There is also a series of units comprising learning activities, paired with assessment activities and templates that can be used to support use of the Scratch (MIT) platform. The Scratch Creative Computing Guide supports assessment activities with visual programming environments.