Interactive Amplify Computing lessons for middle school.

The teacher shares a Scratch bat-and-ball game with two planted bugs: the score never resets when a new game starts, and the ball sometimes sticks to the bat because it turns while still touching it and keeps turning. Each student opens the game from their teacher-managed class account and remixes their own copy, so nobody overwrites anyone else's work while they test ideas. When they find a bug, they post to a class Padlet wall set to school login: which script, what causes the fault and their fix. The teacher watches the posts arrive, stops the class when several different fixes appear for the sticking ball, and asks their authors to argue whose fix stops it for good. Students finish by testing the strongest fix in their own copy and explaining in their books why it works.

Tools: Scratch, Padlet Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher posts three short pseudocode snippets as columns on a class Padlet: one pass of a bubble sort, a linear search that stops at the first match, and a loop that counts how many values in a list are over 50. Each student picks one, traces it by hand with a small list the teacher supplies, and posts a plain-English description of what it does, what input it expects and what it outputs for that list. Students then read the posts in their column and add a comment where a classmate's description would not match the trace. The teacher projects the wall, picks out snippets where students disagreed, for example whether the search returns every match or stops at the first, and the class steps through the code together to settle it.

Tools: Padlet Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher shares three Scratch projects that search a sorted list for a target number: a linear search, a binary search and a jump search that checks every tenth item and then steps back. Students first vote on Mentimeter for the one they think is most efficient. They then run each project on lists of 10, 100 and 1,000 items, read the comparisons counter the teacher has built into each project, and enter their counts in a shared Google Sheet that charts the class's results. With the chart on the board the class re-votes, and the teacher asks students who changed their vote to explain what the numbers showed, drawing out why binary search needs the list to be sorted.

Tools: Scratch, Google Sheets, Mentimeter Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher records a ten-minute screencast of themselves fixing a short Python program that should average a list of test scores but first crashes and then gives the wrong answer, and loads it into Edpuzzle. At five points the video stops with a question: what does this error message tell you, which variable would you print next, what value do you expect it to hold here. Students must answer before the video continues and shows what the teacher actually did. The teacher reviews the answers on the Edpuzzle dashboard, then leads a plenary on the questions where students suggested different next steps, ending with a class list of debugging strategies: read the error message, print the variable, check the loop's range.

Tools: Edpuzzle Nine ideas for your own version in Generate