(Also available in CODAP)
Students learn how to chain Methods together, and define more sophisticated subsets.
Lesson Goals |
Students will be able to…
|
Student-facing Lesson Goals |
|
Materials |
|
Preparation |
|
🔗Design Recipe Practice 25 minutes
Overview
Students practice more of what they learned in the previous lesson, applying the Design Recipe to make table functions that operate on rows of the Animals Dataset. These become the basis of the chaining activity that follows.
Launch
The Design Recipe is a powerful tool for solving problems by writing functions. It’s important for this to be like second nature, so let’s get some practice using it.
Investigate
-
Open your saved Animals Starter File.
-
Define the functions on 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 For many of the situations where you might use |
Synthesize
-
Did you find yourselves getting faster at using the Design Recipe?
-
What patterns or shortcuts are you noticing, when you use the Design Recipe?
🔗Chaining 25 minutes
Overview
Students learn how to compose multiple table operations (sorting, filtering, building) on the same table - a technique called "chaining".
Launch
Suppose we start with some number A, and want to add B, C and D to it. The code below will get the job done:
x = A + B # starting with A, add B
y = x + C # then add C....
result = y + D # then add D to get our result-
Why is this code ugly, or hard to read?
-
Many lines of code means more to read and more possible places for bugs
-
This code creates names for each step. But we don’t really care about
xory— we just want the final answerresult!
-
We can easily chain these operators together, to do all the calculation in one line of code:
result = A + B + C + D-
Open your saved Table Methods Starter File (or open a new one), and click "Run".
-
Can you make a table with a new column called "nametag" that is populated using the
labelfunction? -
Can you take that table, and filter it so it only shows the fixed animals?
-
Can you sort that table by species?
Let’s look at one possible solution to these challenges:
x = animals-table.build-column("labels", nametag) # starting with our table, and add labels
y = with-labels.filter(is-fixed) # then filter by is-fixed...
result = fixed-with-labels.order-by("species", true) # then sort by species to get our result-
Why is this code ugly, or hard to read?
-
Many lines of code means more to read and more possible places for bugs
-
This code creates names for each step. But we don’t really care about
xory— we just want the final answerresult!
-
Pyret allows table methods to be chained together, so that we can build, filter and order a Table in one shot. For example:
result = animals-table.build-column("labels", nametag).filter(is-fixed).order-by("species", true)Let’s walk through this line of code one step at a time:
-
We take the
animals-table, and produce a new table with an extra column calledlabel. -
Then call that Table’s
.filtermethod, producing a new table with alabelcolumn and only rows for fixed animals. -
Then we call that Table’s
order-bymethod, producing a new, sorted table of fixed animals with alabelcolumn.
Teaching Tip Use different color markers to draw nested boxes around each part of the expression, showing each of the three steps described above. |
It can be difficult to read code that has lots of method calls chained together, so we can add a line-break before each . to make it more readable. Here’s the exact same code, written with each method on its own line:
# get a table with the nametags of all
# the fixed animals, order by species
animals-table
.build-column("label", nametag)
.filter(is-fixed)
.order-by("species", true)Order matters: Build , Filter, Sort.
Suppose we want to build a column and then use it to filter our table. If we use the methods in the wrong order (trying to filter by a column that doesn’t exist yet), we might wind up crashing the program. Even worse, the program might work, but produce results that are incorrect!
-
Take a minute to think about what code you would write to sort the animals table by the kilograms column.
-
Do you think
animals-table.order-by("kilograms", true).build-column("kilograms", kilos)will generate the table we want? Why or why not? Test your hypothesis by typing the code that you think will build the table into the starter file!
Investigate
-
How well do you know your table methods ?
-
Complete Chaining Methods and Chaining Methods 2: Order Matters in to find out.
Synthesize
Ask students about their answers to Chaining Methods 2: Order Matters.
-
Which ones produced an error?
-
Why will they produce an error?
-
How could they be fixed?
Can students trigger a similar error in their Table Methods starter file?
As our analysis gets more complex, chaining is a great way to re-use code we’ve already written. And less code means a smaller chance of bugs.
These materials were developed partly through support of the National Science Foundation,
(awards 1042210, 1535276, 1648684, and 1738598). 
Bootstrap by the Bootstrap Community is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 Unported License. This license does not grant permission to run training or professional development. Offering training or professional development with materials substantially derived from Bootstrap must be approved in writing by a Bootstrap Director. Permissions beyond the scope of this license, such as to run training, may be available by contacting contact@BootstrapWorld.org.