It's a new year and the beginning of a new rotation in the STEM Lab. The third grading cycle finds our Kindergarten and first grade students discovering the joys of programming robots with our old friend, Robo-Mouse.
This is Kindergarten's first robotics experience in the lab. It builds on the introduction they had earlier in the year to computer programming via Code.org and Scratch Jr. The first day involves an overview of the proper care and handling of the robots. The Robo-Mouse is quite affordable, but it is not terribly robust and the axles can be stripped a little too easily if students are too rough. Over the years I glad to say we have only lost a few robots to this kind of abuse. Following a brief introduction, students break into groups of 2 or 3 and build mazes and practice programming.
After an exploration day, the students spend a day working with the challenge cards. These two-sided card have a drawing of a maze showing the position of the mouse and the cheese as well as the walls and tunnels. Part of the challenge for students is cooperatively building the maze according to the picture on the card. Once the maze is assembled, the teams work on the programming. The biggest stumbling block I have found in the transition from the Code.org puzzles to Robo-Mouse is that with the robot a turn and a move requires two commands. In the Code.org puzzles, at the Kindergarten and 1st grade levels, students only program movements. Turns as separate commands are not introduced until the 2nd grade.
For 1st grade, the unit begins in a similar fashion, with an introduction to the proper handling and a review of the programming. This is partly because it has been about a year since most of the students used Robo-Mouse, and partly because there are inevitably a few students in each class who are new to Sinclair and have no prior experience with robotics.
They too get a few days to explore and then to practice with the more complex challenge cards. First grade also reviews the use of the algorithm cards. As the students become more comfortable with programming the robot, they seem to become less interested in using the algorithm cards to show their work. I keep on them about it though as it forces them to check and recheck their programs. Otherwise their programming successes look more like trial and error rather than a result of deliberate choices.
The 1st grade only spends a couple of days on the challenge cards. Their real project for this unit is to use the Robo-Mouse as part of a story retell. Students create a story map of a tale of a familiar tale. They then illustrate the important points in the story and place these along a path that they build for the robot. The robot gets programmed to move along the path and as it passes each illustration, the students recount that moment in the story. I model every part of this process using a book that I read to them at the beginning of this phase of the unit. This year I have been using I Want My Hat Back by John Klassen. The story the students have been retelling this year is The 3 Billy Goats Gruff. In most things I give the students choices about this kind of thing, but I have found that for this kind of project, with 1st graders, a choice of stories leads to overly ambitious choices and students do not have enough time to complete the story they want to tell.
So far this rotation, the best thing I have overheard is a couple of first graders struggling with a particularly complex maze of their own design. The student whose turn it was to program groaned, "Ugh! This is so hard!". Their partner agreed, "Yeah, it is," and then added, "but it's fun too." The first student replied, "Yeah, I know" and then they both went back to work debugging their program.
No comments:
Post a Comment