- 15 minutes: Welcome, Survey, & Overview
- 45 minutes: Code Your Revised Game Strategy
- Continue programming your game strategy! (and remember your revisions)
- You may want to refer back to these resources:
- the Introduction to Game Mode tutorial, in which you will learn to use the game mode (as opposed to the free mode that you have been using up to this point).
- the game manual with very detailed information about the competition and rules of the game
- the game overview slideshow, with directions for how to complete most advanced functions of the game (it's a review of the skills challenges)
- the results of the regional competitions
- 45 minutes: Creating the Perfect Tic-Tac-Toe Player
- In the 1950s it was suggested that one day a computer would beat the best humans at chess. Chess players ridiculed the idea. They said it took real intelligence to play chess, something a machine could never have. In 1997 Deep Blue, a chess computer, beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in a tournament rules match. Was Deep Blue the more intelligent? It was just following a program: following instructions written by computer programmers. How did it do it? In this activity we will explore how computers can win at games by creating a program to play tic-tac-toe.
- View real code for an "unbeatable" tic-tac-toe game, in Python and Java.
- 15 minutes: Break
- 60 minutes (with brain break): Continue Coding
- Brain Break: play Space Word-a-Rama, then explore some activities in the Finished Early? section at the bottom of this site
- 20 minutes: Connecting to the Real World with Nova's "Meteor Strike" (Part 1)
- 10 minutes: Wrap-Up & Close-Out: share out (and show off!) progress
Here's a preview to our schedule:
- This Week (Week #4):
- review results of practice regional competition
- work time to revise code
- prepare for actual regional competition
- Next Week (Week #5):
- review results of actual regional competition
- work time to revise code of winning team
- learn more about space exploration and applications of STEM
- improving bottle rocket design
- Friday, August 15th:
- field trip to NASA Ames for the final competition
Finished Early? Here are some activities and resources to explore:
- Explore Forces and Motion
- Newton's Laws of Motion Interactive
- Circus Physics Video
- Quiz
- "Launch a Frisbee into Orbit" introduces angular velocity, angular acceleration, rotational inertia, and torque
- Amusement Park Physics: Roller Coasters
- Some more math and science fun
- Chasing Down a Satellite talks about how satellites work.
- Order of Operations
- Dimensions and 3-D objects
- Vectors: Dampen that Drift
- Break the code in this challenge from the CIA
- Grids & Cartesian Coordinates
- General Coordinates Game
- Play with some coordinates
- Some math manipulatives
- Advanced Coding!
