So, interactive puzzles, what are they? Well, to be honest, they're a way to avoid this. You ever had this? This is not coding obviously. This is an essay that's on the common university application called the Blank Page Problem. You've got something you're supposed to do, a thing you're supposed to create an essay around in this case, and you're just sitting there blinking, going how do I even get started on this? Well, writing an essay and writing a piece of code are not as different as you might think, and the traditional way of teaching programming, you would generally face what we call the Blank Page Problem. Let's have an idea what that looks like. Let's see if we can play this video. All right. What's going on? Where's the mouse? What is the blue thing? Wait, that's too fast. Why are you changing number? Wait. He moved? Where are you clicking? You're moving? I'm confused but it looks like you kind of like maybe drag these things from the left over there to the right. Purple? Wait. Purple? These are all different. I don't know what is going on. How do you know what to do? Yeah. It can be a little complicated until you get to know what's going on. Pretty soon you'll find this easy but doing that for the very first time, not really something we want to subject you to. So, the Blank Page Problem in computer science is, where do we even start? I mean, there were a lot of different things that were there on that Web page, there was a lot of different tiles that seems like that we can choose different colors ones. All of those colored tiles had lots of instructions there, which instruction do I even choose? How do I get it into my running code? Et cetera. Sometimes, it seemed like there were numbers that we'd get changed, maybe it originally said, move 10 steps and we change that to 50 or something like that. Why did that happen? So, the reality is, if you are new to all this, this can feel really overwhelming. We don't want you to have to experience that. So, why is that? Well, we've started studying a little bit more about this idea of how do we write programs, and we're starting to find that some evidence that writing a program is what we call a very high cognitive load task. That is, there's a lot of different things to think about. You have to think about, what is the program that you're actually trying to make? Your trying to navigate that Web page which we call Integrated Development Environment. You have to identify like, where do I find my instructions that I can use? Which instructions do I want to choose? How do I have to modify it? Where do they click together? Oh, my God. There's many things. It can make your brain want to exploit. Again, we are not about exploding brains, and especially if we're thinking about teaching computing to all k-12 students. We need to find a way to help them gain some experience with programming but with less cognitive load, with a simpler starting point so they can focus on some of the basics and then we'll start to add the other things. So, how are we going to do that? We're going to do it with interactive puzzles. What are the benefits? The benefits of interactive puzzles, we're going to give them to you, is we are going to provide all the instructions that you need. You don't have to go hunting and pecking and choosing something move versus turn versus whatever, we'll give you only the instructions that you need. If any of those instructions need to be modified in any way in terms of how much you're supposed to turn 15 degrees or 90 degrees or how many steps you're supposed to move, those are all going to be made for you. All you will be responsible for in interactive puzzles is taking the set of instructions that have already been dragged out for you. You will move them around and click them together until they're in the right order. What's the right order? Well, we'll show you, but we're going to actually provide you a video of what your final program is supposed to do. All you have to do is match up what your code is doing to what that program is doing. So, what's the real benefit of this? Again, we're going to try to reduce the cognitive load of doing your very first experience with programming by reducing the number of choices you have to make, and to focus you in on our key concept for this week, which is that we give instructions in a particular sequence or order that really matters, and figuring out what that order is, that's your job in learning to program this week.
