Use 7-day 4-doses-a-day pill-organizers to introduce students to 2D arrays because these create an interactive, 7-by-4 two-dimensional array that helps students visualize this abstract concept.

  • This activity requires having enough 7-by-4 pill-organizers (sometimes called pill-keepers) to distribute to student groups.
    • You can have as many student groups as you have pill-organizers to accommodate them.
    • Pill-organizers can also be purchased at a low cost.
      • Ideally, the pill organizers do not have clear box covers.
  • Activity Setup:
    • Put small trinkets into different boxes in the pill compartments.
      • Not all compartments are included in the scavenger hunt, but all the compartments do contain trinkets.
    • You can vary where the trinkets go in the pill organizer so that each group has a different answer.
      • If you do not have pill-organizers, instructors could create inexpensive cardboard Bingo cards, and call out the numbers as cell addresses, instead of B8, use Bingo[0][7].
  • Activity:
    • Distribute pill-organizers to student groups.
    • Introduce the scavenger hunt activity.
    • Give each group a sheet of paper with a series of coordinates (for example: keeper[0][1]).
      • On the worksheet they are asked to open the compartment and fill in the blank on the sheet about what was in the compartment.
    • Have students answer questions like:
      • arr[2][3] + arr[1][4]
      • This is important because students may have difficulty using the values they get from array references in other calculations.

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External Source

Interview with Leslie Spivey.