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Sample Student Work
Exemplars of student work at different levels, annotated with teacher notes.
Note
This page is a placeholder. It will be populated with real student work after the first full classroom run of Geometry Playground. Until then, it serves as a structure for what will eventually live here.
Student work cannot be ethically displayed without permission, so the exemplars on this page will all be either:
- Work produced by the author during curriculum development (labelled "reference solution").
- Real student work reproduced with written permission from students and parents.
The plan is to feature two exercises in depth:
The Union Jack is the flagship Chapter V exercise because it composes three smaller flag functions (St Andrew, St Patrick, St George) into a single layered result. It's the cleanest demonstration of function composition in the curriculum.
Exemplars to include:
- Beginning (1/4): A Union Jack attempted with copy-pasted code, no function composition.
- Developing (2/4): Functions used, but the three crosses are not drawn as separate reusable functions (the student coded each cross inline).
- Proficient (3/4): Three separate flag functions composed correctly. Z-order handled. Output is recognisable.
- Exemplary (4/4): Three separate flag functions, plus a wrapper function that takes position and size parameters so the flag can be drawn anywhere at any size.
For each exemplar, annotations will call out what earned the score and what a student at the next level up would do differently.
The capstone exercise for the whole curriculum. Open-ended, creative, and the single best test of whether a student has internalised decomposition.
Exemplars to include:
- Beginning: A single giant main routine, no helper functions, copy-pasted house code three times.
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Developing: A few helper functions but one (
drawHouse) is enormous and does too much. - Proficient: Five or six well-named helper functions, a short main routine, correct z-order, uses the accumulator pattern for the fence.
- Exemplary: Clean decomposition, plus original elements (a sunset, a moving car trail, a garden). Code is so readable that you can predict the picture from the main routine alone.
Rubrics are abstract. A teacher reading the Rubrics page for the first time will understand the four criteria intellectually but won't have a concrete sense of what a "3 in decomposition" looks like versus a "4 in decomposition". Exemplars fix that. They ground the rubric in actual code.
Exemplars also help students. At the start of a chapter, showing students a set of anonymous exemplars from the previous class (or from a reference solution) gives them a target to aim at. "Here's what 'proficient' looks like for this exercise. Here's what 'exemplary' looks like. Now try your own."
Important: never show exemplars before students have attempted the exercise. The point is to give them something to compare their own work against, not to pre-load them with a template to copy.
If you've taught Geometry Playground and have student work you'd like to contribute (with permission), please contact the author via the links on Home. Attribution and anonymisation can be handled however the contributing teacher prefers.
Good exemplar candidates:
- Work that cleanly demonstrates one point on the rubric.
- Work that shows a common misconception being resolved.
- Work that is genuinely creative and goes beyond the spec in an interesting way.
- Work that is almost correct but has one instructive bug.
The last category (almost correct with one instructive bug) is often the most valuable. A student who can spot the bug in someone else's code has learned to debug their own.
- Rubrics for the grading scale these exemplars will illustrate
- Assessment Strategies for the philosophy
- Teaching FAQ for questions about assessment
Geometry Playground · a Swift Playgrounds curriculum for high school geometry · dbbudd.github.io · built by Daniel Budd