Today, I came in with some jelly, bread and a knife and asked students to give me instructions to make a jelly sandwich.  At first, instructions looked something like “take two slides of bread, apply jam and put bread together.”  The sandwich robot tore through the bag of bread, sent some slices flying all over, applied jam to the side of the bread and put the slices together upside down.  Students quickly realized that the instructions we give to each other are very different from the ones we have to give to robots or computers.  We make a lot of assumptions based on our previous experiences but computers do no such thing.

We talked about how our instructions would have to be much more specific including details such as how to get bread from a bag, which end to pick up the knife from and where to spread the jelly.  We talked about how we could pre-define certain tasks that might be useful in other contexts.  For example, we could program the robot to always open a bread bag a certain way so it wouldn’t make a mess.

Students practiced giving specific instructions by trying to give their partner instructions on how to draw an image of their choice.  Some instructions were very successful and others resulted in funny drawings!  We talked about how using predefined shapes such as squares or circles helped.  Specifying the relative size and placement of such shapes also helped get better results.

I closed by showing a quick demo of Scratch, the programming environment we will be using.

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