Offline Coding Activities You Can Do with Your Students – Loops

Are you looking for a fun, free coding activity that you can do with your class? CodeMonkey has you covered in our newest blog column – Offline Coding Activities. You don’t need any coding experience to carry-out this activity – simply read the following exercise and then do it tomorrow in class! This week’s 25 minute-long activity will help students understand how loops work in programming.

Step 1 – 10 mins.
Discuss the following with your students:

Programming is not only about writing the correct statements in the correct order, it is also about knowing how to write clear and short code.
Imagine that we have to write a simple program to make the monkey climb up a high staircase of 100 steps and we can only use the function “stepUp” to make the monkey climb up one step at a time.
Ask your students: “Do you think that the programmer wrote a line of code for every stair-step?” Just imagine how LONG this code would be ! It would be 100 lines of code!
So, instead of code that looks like this (X100):
stepUp stepUp stepUp etc…
Wouldn’t it be great to write something shorter? Ask your students to suggest a shorter way. How about something like this?
stepUp 100 times
Luckily, this is possible. Not exactly the way we just wrote it now, but quite similar. Code that is written in such a way is called a loop.

Step 2 – 5 mins.
Explain the following:

Explain to your class that a “simple loop” is a sequence of instructions that repeats a specified number of times. There are also other kinds of loops (for loops, until loops) that last until a particular condition is met, but we will learn about those later on.

       100.times ->
           stepUp

       step 10
       turn left
       step 10
       turn left
       step 10
       turn left
       step 10
       turn left

       step 10
       turn left

       4.times->
           step 10
           turn left

This offline coding activity is from Lesson 5 in the Coding Adventure Part 1: Fundamentals lesson plans. For more fun activities and a detailed curriculum guide on how to teach CodeMonkey, sign-up for our free teacher trial here.