Up to now all of the partners have worked to brainstorm, define and refine task families under the guidance of the IO3 and IO4 leads. We came up with several great task families. But first, let me introduce you to the idea of a task family:

A task family gives the teacher the opportunity to select a perfect fitting task for their students that builds upon the skills they have and introduces them to a new topic.

The teacher will define in the portal a task family and will work his way through the diagram above. That means that he will be able to choose the scenario, settings, hints and so on and will receive a specific task that can be added to the path. More on the work in the portal can be found here.

We have defined several task families and already implemented two of them.

Building Cubes:

A certain structure made out of cubes has to be implemented. This happens via giving a certain position
for a to-being-set cube and then actually placing them.

Drone with an AR-view

In this task family the flying route of a drone has to be implemented. There are several 3D-buildings
on the map with tiles that have to be photographed. The student has to implement a flying route
including the rotation of the drone around its axis and when to take a picture.

Truchet Tiling

There is a given grid and one tile. With this tile different patterns can be created by turning the tile in
all four directions. Students have to create a given pattern either by simply tapping on the tile to rotate
it or by programming a little turtle which walks along the whole grid and “stamps” the tiles with the
correct rotation.

Fantasy Potion / Train station / knotted cube and further graph algorithm task families

There are given conditions like certain potions cannot be stored with other potions in direct contact.
These conditions can be translated into graphs and through programming or evaluating this graph you
can find the perfect way of storing the potions. A similar approach is possible with train stations or
airports where you cannot “store” e.g. let two airplanes land on the same runway.

Eulerian paths

The students will receive a graph and have to implement a way to find the eulerian path.

Draw-o-Robot

The students will receive a certain figure to be drawn which consists of simple edges connecting on
the vertices in 90°. The robot has to be programmed in such a way that it draws on the grid the
expected figure.

Process Diagrams

A lot of different processes in our every-day life but also in science (e.g. in Mathematics) can be made
clearer using a process diagram. The students will receive one process (for example: brewing a tea)
and will have to order the different tasks that are involved in this process. This task family can be
broadened to nearly every school subject. For example solving a mathematical equation can be
conceptualized in a process diagram.

Jumping Frog

On a grid are different “leaves” that contain different points. The goal is to program the way of a frog
in such a way that it will collect a certain number of points by jumping on certain leaves.

Escape

A 3D-building with different rooms is given including your current location and the exit of the building.
Students will have to find the shortest way through this building to get to the exit. This task family can
also be solved by a graph algorithm as you can use the graph as a more abstract version of this building,
the different rooms and their connections.

Kill the point

A coordinate system containing points is given and students have to find a function (with a given type)
such that points are “hit” or not. There is also the possibility to broaden this task family including points
for each point in the coordinate system such that (similar to the jumping frog) a certain amount of
points have to be collected or a certain point is not allowed to be hit by the function.

A first draft-version of this task family can be found in the web-portal. So far it is only a proof-of-
concept that the Cindy JS plugin is working. The task family hasn’t been worked out fully yet but is
planned to being fully integrated soon.