Students learn how to compose functions that operate on tables.
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Student-facing Lesson Goals |
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🔗Design Recipe Practice 25 minutes
Overview
Students apply the Design Recipe to make table functions that operate on rows of the Animals Dataset. These become the basis of the composition activity that follows.
Launch
When filtering rows or building columns, we need to write functions. This should be done carefully! We want our results to be rock solid and accurate, especially if they’re going to be used in ways that affect the world around us.
The Design Recipe is a sequence of steps that helps us document, test out, and write functions that let us dig deeper into our data, and analyze it more carefully. It’s important for this to be like second nature, so let’s get some practice using it.
Investigate
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Open your saved Animals Starter File.
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Define the function The Design Recipe: is-dog / is-female and The Design Recipe: is-old / name-has-s.
Optional: Combining Booleans
Suppose we want to build a table of Animals that are fixed and old, or a table of animals that are cats or dogs?
By using the and and or operators, we can combine Boolean tests, as in: (1 > 2) and ("a" == "b"). This is handy for more complex programs! For example, we might want to ask if a character in a video game has run out of health points and if they have any more lives. We might want to know if someone’s ZIP Code puts them in Texas or New Mexico. When you go out to eat at a restaurant, you might ask what items on the menu have meat and cheese.
For many of the situations where you might use and, there’s actually a much more powerful mechanism you can use, called Composition!
Synthesize
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Did you find yourselves getting faster at using the Design Recipe?
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What patterns or shortcuts are you noticing, when you use the Design Recipe?
🔗Composing 25 minutes
Overview
Students learn to diagram expressions using the Circles of Evaluation. This tool has deep roots in both Order of Operations and Function Composition, and math teachers may want to take a detour through one or both of these lessons to support those learning goals.
Launch
We already know how to filter, sort, and build columns - but what if we want to do multiple things, all at once? Sorting, Filtering and Building are powerful operations, but when they are combined they become even more powerful!
A journalist comes to the shelter who wants to write a story about a successful pet adoption — but she has a very specific set of criteria. The reporter wants to report on the adoption of an animal that weighs more than 9 kilograms (they don’t use "pounds" in Britain!).
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To provide her with this data, what operations do we need to do to our dataset?
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We need to filter, showing only rows that are greater than 9kg. We also need to add a column that shows weight in kilograms, dividing pounds by 2.2.
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Order matters: Build, Filter, Sort.
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What do you think will happen if we try to filter animals that weigh more than 9kg, before actually building a
"kilos"column?-
(Sample responses:) It will crash! The computer won’t like it!
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If we use our functions in the wrong order (trying to filter by a column that doesn’t exist yet), we might wind up crashing the program. But even worse, the program might run but produce nonsensical results!
One way to organize our thoughts is to diagram what we want to do, using the Circles of Evaluation. The rules are simple:
1) Every Circle must have one - and only one! - function, written at the top.
2) The arguments of the function are written left-to-right, in the middle of the Circle.
Values like Numbers, String, and Booleans are still written by themselves. It’s only when we want to use a function that we need to draw a Circle, and write the values inside from left-to-right.
Let’s try diagramming what we need to do for the journalist, using the Circles of Evaluation. We always build first, so let’s start there. According to the Contract, we know the name of the function is build-column, and it needs three arguments: the animals table, the name of the new column "kilos", and the kilograms function.
But we also need to filter by that new column, so that we only have animals weighing more than 9kg! That means we need another Circle of Evaluation. We know filter goes at the top. But what table are we using for the first argument? It can’t be the animals-table again, because that doesn’t have a "kilos" column.
3) Circles can contain other Circles!
Our first Circle of Evaluation produces a table, and that’s the one we want to use as the first input to filter!
Investigate
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Complete Composing Table Operations.
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For more of a challenge, tackle Composing Table Operations: Order Matters!
To convert a Circle of Evaluation into code, we start at the outside and work our way in. After each function we write a pair of parentheses, and then convert each argument inside the Circle. The code for this Circle of Evaluation would be box-plot(filter(filter(animals-table, is-dog), is-young), "age").
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Type this into Pyret and see what you get!
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Draw the Circle of Evaluation showing how to make a bar chart showing the species in the shelter, but only for old animals. Then convert it to code and type it into Pyret.
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For practice converting Circles of Evaluation into code, complete From Circles to Code.
Teaching Tip
Use different color markers to draw the Circles of Evaluation, and then use those same colors when writing the code. This helps make the connection between Circles and code clearer.
Complete Planning Table Operations.
Synthesize
Was it helpful to think about the Circles, without worrying about Pyret? Why or why not?
🔗Additional Exercises
These materials were developed partly through support of the National Science Foundation, (awards 1042210, 1535276, 1648684, 1738598, 2031479, and 1501927). 
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