Writing a ‘Pick Your Own Adventure’ book is a fun way to develop students’ understanding of coding as a series of instructions that can change depending on different inputs or conditions. When students are designing their branching chart they are building choices, or decisions. Making decisions is an easy way to develop conceptual understanding of computational thinking. This is the building blocks of algorithms, the step-by-step procedures required for solving a problem. As students storyboard their choices they are visualising algorithms and learning the concept of ‘branching’. Branching is making a decision between one of two or more actions depending on sets of conditions and the data provided.
