Robot Friend

Instructions:

As the programmer, your secret goal is to make the robot draw a balloon. Don’t tell the robot!

First, ask your friend to wait in another room. Put a pencil and a piece of paper on a table. Then, think about every step the robot will have to take to draw a balloon on that piece of paper. Write down each step in great detail. (Hint: Step #1 can be “Walk to the table.”)

Now, ask your friend to come into the room and put on the robot mask. While they are wearing the mask they are a robot, and they can ONLY do EXACTLY what you say!

Read each step that you wrote down out loud, so that your friend can follow them one at a time. Read exactly what you wrote down, even if it’s not working out how you thought it would!

If the robot successfully draws a balloon, then congratulations! You wrote a great program!

If the robot does not successfully draw a balloon, then try again! Figure out which steps need to be fixed, and rewrite them. You might need to add a step, remove a step, or put the steps in a different order. In programming, this is called debugging the program. See if your new program is more successful!