Our Little Computer Genius
Posted By markmyers on January 5, 2017
While we are doing work with computers and programming with Scratch, I have been working on the concept of loops with Sam. For anyone who doesn’t know, in computer programming, a loop is a sequence of instructions that is continually repeated until a certain condition is reached. Ever the little troublemaker, Sam keeps typing loops that have really large repeat values, like 1 million or more (and laughing manically while doing it). I keep explaining to her that she shouldn’t do that because it will cause computer problems like memory crashes, but she doesn’t seem to get it.
Sam uses something called “Scratch Jr.” on the Kindle, which is a somewhat pared down version of the Scratch we use on the computer. Scratch Jr. limits loops to 99. Even though I have not showed Sam “nested loops” yet, she somehow figured it out on her own and added numerous, repeated nested loops to get around the limitations…smart kiddo. Here is a screenshot of her program, where you can see she nested loops of 99 over and over again to achieve the same result that she wanted on the computer.
She has gotten really good at Scratch programming, making more and more complicated programs. Here is one of her videos!
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