Advanced Technology
Advanced Technology is a Trimester 2 class for 8th Graders wherein students will be working primarily with Bootstrap. Bootstrap is a popular new program language that uses HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. Bootstrap utilizes and applies algebraic concepts and rigorous programming principles in order to help students create a simple video game. Students use order of operations, function composition, the distance formula, coordinates and inequalities in the plane to detect collisions, handle keystrokes, and determine how they move and interact, with each challenge framed as a standard word-problem. The module is aligned to National & State Standards for Mathematics, the CSTA standards and K12CS frameworks, and has been shown to improve students’ performance on standard algebraic tasks.
Assignments
Unit 1 - Students discuss the components of their favorite videogames, and discover that they can be reduced to a series of coordinates. They then explore coordinates in Cartesian space, and identify the coordinates for the characters in a game at various points in time. Once they are comfortable with coordinates, they brainstorm their own games and create sample coordinate lists for different points in time in their own game.
Unit 2 - Students are introduced to a set-mapping representation for functions, in which the function object exists as a means of translating points from a Domain into a Range. Coupled with their understanding of Circles of Evaluation, students generalize their understanding of functions to include other datatypes, including Strings and Images.
Unit 3 - Students are introduced to the Definitions area, and learn the syntax for defining values of various types. They are also introduced to the syntax of defining functions and creating examples.
Unit 4 - Students continue to practice the Design Recipe by applying it to simple problems.
Unit 5 - Students define functions that map attributes of their game from one frame to the next, allowing them to move their dangers, targets, and projectiles.
Unit 6 - Students discover Boolean types, and use them to create programs that test values, and then model scenarios using these programs.
Unit 7 - Students use piecewise functions to move their players in response to key-presses.
Unit 8 - Students derive, discuss, and prove the Pythagorean theorem, then use this theorem—
