In App Design class, I ask my students keep their code statements in groups and name the groups something logical, like Game Controls. For the older kids, sometimes they get a detailed discussion of how good writers choose words to have meaning for the reader, so we have to choose words that are meaningful to the reader. The reader of these words will be the student in the future, and their programming teacher, and while we have the technical ability to put statements in any order and name groups and variables anything we want, future-student will thank you for making it logical and simple.
Anyway, the other day I asked the students to make a new group called Spikes and then to watch carefully and pay attention to our first hero-murdering lesson.
“Do we call this Spikes or Spike’s?” one of my students asked.
“No apostrophe. Just plain Spikes because it’s plural.”
“Plural?”
“We need more than one spike to scare our hero! And look at the art, look at all those spikes. You just use S for more than one spike. You use the apostrophe when something belongs to something else.”
“Oh,” he turned back to his computer, “That makes sense. I think you could even be an English teacher, Miss Meg.”
