READING: Pattern Finding "Laziness"

Students who are learning to read focus so much on decoding that there is little room left for comprehension.  This is where pattern recognition can help.  Being adept at pattern recognition helps relieve students' cognitive load, and helps them do things automatically.  The better our brains are at quickly finding patterns, the more we can focus on other aspects of the task.  The end goal of pattern recognition is to help our brains (or computers) achieve automation.  It may sound weird, but coders are proud to be “lazy."  Or rather, they prefer to reduce the effort required to accomplish a task whenever possible.  In order to be good at minimizing effort, we need to understand how to use patterns to our advantage. 

Example: Suppose I wanted to teach the computer to draw the following picture:

squares.png

 In order to draw the squares above, my code might look like the following:

code_for_drawing_a_square

Do you think a lazy coder would want to pull out ALL of those blocks and connect them together?  No WAY!  Coders need to develop the ability to find patterns in the code so they can avoid repetitive nonsense like this.  Once they improve their skills of finding patterns, they are one step closer to coding in all their LAZY glory!!!  Can you find the pattern in the following five examples?

  1. shape_patterns.png
  2. dot_patterns.png
  3. arrow_patterns.png

  4. 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 17, ___, ___, ___.

  5. 4, 9,16, 25, 36, 49, ____, ____, ____.

 

Just for fun, here's one more challenge.  Patterns are often used to create and decode messages, like this shift cipher below:

“Oggv og cv pqqp cv vjg jgcfswctvgtu.”