Edutopia – Marina Umaschi Bers
In a first-grade classroom, Ms. Lorna begins to introduce students to robotics. The students eagerly situate themselves at their tables and hush as she starts reciting the children’s book There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. While reading, Ms. Lorna points to various uses of repetition, a term the students have recently learned in English class. She calls upon them to raise their hands when repetition is used throughout the story. Again and again, students’ hands shoot up across the classroom at the countless repeating words or phrases. Ms. Lorna refers to the predictability of this repetition as a pattern. At the end of the story, Ms. Lorna explains that repetition is not only essential in natural languages such as English but also in programming languages such as KIBO.” (more)