The bear hunt

This challenge is inspired from Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s children book “We are going on a bear hunt”. In this story, a family skids down a grassy slope, swishes across a river, sludges through mud and finally sees a bear who chases them all the way back to their home.

This story is based on a repetitive verse where the same verse is repeated several times and each time only a few words are changed.

So let’s see how we could apply our programming skills to print the words or lyrics of a repetitive story or song.

Learning Objectives

In this post we will investigate how to use a subroutine do write code more efficiently. We will also pass parameters to our subroutine.

You will also use string concatenation techniques to join two strings together.

Investigate the code below. See how we have defined a subroutine called printVerse() and used two parameters for this subroutine: obstacle and onomatopoeia (a word that represents a sound: e.g. splosh).

Challenge #1

Using a similar approach write a piece of code to print the lyrics of the following song:

Five little speckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating some most delicious bugs – yum, yum
One jumped into the pool
Where it was nice and cool
Now there are four green speckled frogs – glub, glub.

Four little speckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating some most delicious bugs – yum, yum
One jumped into the pool
Where it was nice and cool
Now there are three green speckled frogs – glub, glub.

Three little speckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating some most delicious bugs – yum, yum
One jumped into the pool
Where it was nice and cool
Now there are two green speckled frogs – glub, glub.

Two little speckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating some most delicious bugs – yum, yum
One jumped into the pool
Where it was nice and cool
Now there are one green speckled frogs- glub, glub.

One little speckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating some most delicious bugs – yum, yum
One jumped into the pool
Where it was nice and cool
Now there are no green speckled frogs – glub, glub.

Challenge #2

Using a similar approach write a piece of code to print the words of the “10 ladybugs” story by Melanie Gerth and Laura Huliska-Beith:

Ten little ladybugs sitting on a vine,
along came a butterfly – then there were…

Nine little ladybugs skipping on a gate,
along came a caterpillar – then there were…

Eight little ladybugs looking up at heaven,
along came a bird – then there were…

Seven little ladybugs resting on sticks,
along came a grasshopper – then there were…

Six little ladybugs flying near a hive,
along came a bumble bee – then there were…

Five little ladybugs sleeping by the shore,
along came a fish – then there were…

Four little ladybugs climbing up a tree,
along came a turtle – then there were…

Three little ladybugs drinking up dew,
along came a duck – then there were…

Two little ladybugs basking in the sun,
along came a frog – then there was…

One little ladybug sitting all alone,
along came a breeze – then she was HOME!