Following Directions

Today we learned the importance of following instructions and how the computer follows instructions. We started taking this quiz: Following Directions Quiz . See if you can complete it in 5 minutes.

Then we followed the instructions to draw a picture and there were lots of different interpretations like this one on the left.

We ended with an activity where everyone tried to write simple instructions for making a peanut butter sandwich. It turns out that a computer doesn't understand english very well and took the instructions way too literal and things got a bit messy (here is an example). 

We concluded that English is not a good language for the computer. The language a computer needs is very detailed and specific in its instructions. It needs instructions like "add", or "subtract", or "draw a pixel at this location". Computers are not smart, they only know how to follow instructions and we need formal computer languages to communicate with them to write programs.