Today, we are going to be playing a puzzle game called Lightbot. In Lightbot, there is a robot

and he lives in a world of square tiles. The goal in each level is for Lightbot to light up all the

blue tiles in the level. However, Lightbot

does not understand something as complicated assaying “light all the blue tiles”. Instead, he

does understand a basic set of rules.

Display the following to students.

An arrow icon tells Lightbot to move forward one space.

A lightbulb icon tells Lightbot to light up the tile he is standing on

An arrow tells the ligthbot to turn left or right

Lightbot can also Jump here is the block you use to Jump

You are all going to play Lightbot and try to beat the “Basics” level set. To control Lightbot you

need to give him a set of instructions, called a ‘program’, to run. Once you press the green play

button, Lightbot will perform all the instructions in the program one at a time. If he makes a

mistake, you will then have to tell Lightbot to go back to the start, and afterwards, change the

program to give the correct instructions.

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What are Functions

In computer programming, a function or subroutine is a sequence of program instructions that performs a specific task, packaged as a unit. This unit can then be used in programs wherever that particular task should be performed.

A function in programming is a set of things you do in a certain order, and you package those things into a single set and give it a name, and then when you tell the computer to run the function, it does those exact steps. YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIST ALL THE STEPS JUST SAY THE NAME AND THE COMPUTER DOES ALL THE STEPS IN THE RIGHT SEQUENCE.

4/2015

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Students learn about “procedures” in the second level of Lightbot.  Players in Lightbot must use procedures when they don’t have enough space in the MAIN block to solve a problem. Procedures are helpful when you want to re-use a set of commands multiple times. When a P1 icon is run, all the commands in PROC1 are executed, and at the end of PROC1, the program runs the commands following the P1 icon.This is much like procedures or functions in a typed programming language. Procedures are useful for re-using code and extracting out code that would otherwise be duplicated in a program, or that deals with a specific set of actions.  To illustrate this concept, we defined a classroom P1 and P2.   P1:  students stand up, clap 3 times, and then sit down.   P2:  students stand up, spin around, and then sit down. I put a pattern P1 P2 P1 P1 on the board and watched to see if the students understood the concept.  Then they started at the second level of Lightbot.