AP Computer Science Students Use Legos to Depict Differences in Instructional Language

AP Computer Science Principles teacher Maria Morrell surprised Upper School students in her class when she arrived with a bin of Legos. Why? She had students use the Legos to learn how natural language is much more ambiguous than programming language when giving instructions. Students were tasked with building a small Lego structure and writing detailed instructions for its assembly. They then tasked classmates with reassembling the structure, following their written instructions. It was not as easy as they thought, and was a great segue into the use of unambiguous programming language.