Pattern Finding Intro

It may sound weird, but computational thinkers 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:

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

Yikes! Computational Thinkers need to develop the ability to find patterns so they can free up memory (their own and that of a machine). 

Can you find the pattern in the following five examples?

1. 
2. 
3. 

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.”