Student Workbook [PDF] - The lesson plans linked below are tightly integrated into the Student Workbook, which should be used with the curriculum. A Teacher’s Edition is also available upon request. Please fill out a request using our online form, and we’ll get back to you right away.

Unit 1Students review almost all of the material from Bootstrap 1, including Circles of Evaluation, Contracts, Expressions dealing with strings and images, Variable definitions, Function definitions, and the Design Recipe.

Unit 2Students discover the need for data structures and they practice defining them, making examples, and writing functions that produce them.

Unit 3Students, having made pre-built data structures in the last lesson (autos), will generalize their understanding by defining various data structures of their own and accessing their fields. Students are introduced to Racket’s purely-functional microworld implementation. This requires an understanding of functions, data structures, and an introduction to events-based programming. To accomplish this, students first work with a simple world (a number, representing a dog’s x-coordinate). This world is consumed and produced by the update-world function, and drawn by draw-world. To understand events, they act out the World model, actually becoming event handlers and timers, to simulate a running program.

Unit 4Students return to the Ninja World game, and codewalk through the ’update-world’ and ’draw-world’ functions. Making minimal changes to these functions, they are able to modify the dog’s speed, add static clouds, etc. They then modify the world to include the ruby’s x-coordinate, and systematically update each function in the source code to accommodate this new world. If time allows, additional iterations are possible by adding more sets of coordinates to the World. Students brainstorm their videogames, and derive the structure for their game world.

Unit 5After thinking about their World, students practice building, drawing and animating it.

Unit 6Students return to the subject of partial functions, this time defining a key-event handler that modifies their world when certain keys are pressed.

Unit 7Students continue to combine their use of Cond and Data Structures, this time identifying ways in which the World structure might change without any user input.

Unit 8Students return to the Pythagorean Theorem and distance formula they used in Bootstrap 1, this time with data structures and the full update-world function.

Unit 9This unit includes instructions for adding frequently-requested elements to students’ games, such as extra levels and a scoring system. Students comfortable with structures are encouraged to use nested structures in their games for more complexity.