Small Basic - Lesson 3 - chessboard challenge

**Small Basic - Lesson 3 **- Chessboard challenge

In this series of lessons we will take pupils from no experience of Small Basic to a good understanding with the skills to solve problems and think algorithmically in Small Basic. Students should enter this scheme of work with a basic understanding of computational thinking, having some graphical based language experience such as Scratch, Kodu, HourOfCode, etc. In addition to other expectations, this lesson benefits from being proceeded with a lesson on Flowcharts or Pseudocode. Pupils recap their planning skills before coding. Support pupils by issuing some paper and pencils do they can keep track of the Turtles position vs their drawing.

This is particularly useful for meeting the needs of teaching a text based programming language based on (KS3 in England / BGE in Scotland) outcomes and is a strong foundation/scaffolding to supporting students to program in Python in following units.

For the less confident teacher I have included a bunch of pre-written Small Basic programs to demonstrate WAGOLL.

In this lesson:
Recap knowledge from previous lesson.
Discuss planning skills - flowcharts / pseudocode
Revisit the features of the Small Basic IDE
Debugging
Sequencing
Challenge - to draw a chess board
Pupils to consider the number of lines used to code their solution
Teacher tracks most elegant solutions (square by square, zig zag lines, outwardly growing squares, etc)