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The Four Main Arithmetic Operators

It’s pretty easy to do math in the Python programming language.

Dependencies​

Students need to have these skills before learning this skill:

Goal​

When you teach this skill, your goal is to make it so that students can write code that looks like this:

print(1 + 2)
print(2 - 3)
print(3 * 4)
print(10 / 2)

Activities​

Here are some activities that you can do in order to teach this skill.

Writing code on the board​

  1. Write this code on the board:

    print(1 + 1)

  2. Ask students what they think that code will do.

  3. Ask a student to come up to the board and add another print line. Ask them to make the line do subtraction instead of addition.

  4. Ask another student to come up to the board and add another print line. Ask them to make the line do multiplication.

  5. Ask another student to come up to the board and add another print line. Ask them to make the line do division.

You’ll probably have to correct students when it comes to multiplication and division. Most students probably won’t guess that * is the symbol for multiplication and / is the symbol for division on their first try.