Dash & Dot have visited with every K-2 class during Library at Newbury Elementary School, and our 3/4 Owls are working especially hard on a backstory and programming that shares our school’s vision and mission with the next schools the robots visit.
The Owls have named the robots Harmony (Dash) and Nature Rocks (Dot) and are programming them to share Newbury’s vision of World Peace and mission of Harmony with Self, Others, and Nature. They are also working on explaining our behavior program, ROCKS (Respect,Ownership, Citizenship, Kindness, and Safety).
The Kindergarteners created a basic storyboard for Dash and then partnered with students from older grades to do the programming. It was wonderful to see the multi-age collaboration and problem solving at work!
Over the next two weeks, we are hoping that the 5th and 6th graders will have time to program Dash and Dot to share “A Christmas Carol.” Our 3-6 grades are attending a production of that play this week. Hopefully, we won’t have any more snow days!
Robotics in Practice
The following links provide examples of robotics in use
that have direct implications for K-12 education settings:
It's a short blurb,
Vermont Robot Rodeo
Fifty schools across Vermont are participating in the
inaugural Vermont Robot Rodeo. Participants can test
out a cadre of robots, share best practices and learning
strategies, swap robots for various projects, and learn
coding basics.
We are getting ready to launch our second Robot Rodeo
The Robot Rodeo will start in November 2016 and culminate in May 2017 at Vermont's Dynamic Landscape Conference.
Each school who participates will get to train a robot for ONE month. They will be asked to add pictures and movies of their robot's visit to their school.
If you'd like to HOST a Robot, check out the HOST Schools Tab above and sign UP soon!
We are looking forward to another successful year and have a few new twist to introduce this year.
Thank you to all the participants and sponsors of our first Annual Robot Rodeo!
As you can see from the video below our first Rodeo Rodeo was a huge success and we've had lots of request from schools who want to join. The Robots visited 40 schools last year. This year we are hoping to expand the opportunities we can provide to introduce Coding and Robots to Vermont schools.
If you know anyone who would like to to sponsor a Robot to travel around the state to Vermont schools, where students will train it for the 2017 Rodeo, please send this to this page. Each sponsor purchases the robot of their choice to be added to the fleet of traveling robots.
f you are a school who would like to participate in the 2016 - 2017 year please sign up here.
Visit the Innovation Lounge to watch demos of how students throughout Vermont learned to code our 13 robots -- training them for the Robot Rodeo on May 23 and 24!
Try one of the robots yourself and learn some new coding tricks!
Ollie and the Cambridge Elementary soccer obstacle course!
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Ollie arrives at Cambridge Elementary School. Hmmm, how about an obstacle course?
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The iRobot Create 2 came to visit Bellows Falls Union High School. At first, students scoffed at the Roomba with comments like "My Grandmother has one of those silly things that cleans her house!" With a lot of chuckling we fired up the beast and let it do it's demo self clean program in the classroom. Many students rolled their eyes. You could feel the attitudes saying "That's it!? Mr. Norkun really got us a vacuum cleaner? What are we supposed to do with this thing? "
The next thing we did was strip off the green cover to access some of the guts of the robot.
We spent some time navigating the robots website looking for ideas. There were claims that using scratch with some special plugins would allow for easy programming. We discovered that these scratch plugins weren't compatible with our Linux lab. So, back to the drawing board. We discovered that python was our best bet. I created a few lessons that directed students to use Codeacademy to learn some python basics.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import Tkinter
import tkMessageBox
top = Tkinter.Tk()
def hello():
tkMessageBox.showinfo("Say Hello", "Hello World")
B1 = Tkinter.Button(top, text = "Say Hello", command = hello)
B1.pack()
top.mainloop()
We downloaded a pre-configured python script to allow for tethered driving. From here we thought things were going to be simple, yet the robot revolt started. Somehow the script caused the robot to come alive. It decided to move really slow in a circle, without being connected to anything.
See for your self!
We ended having to perform open heart surgery on the beast to do a hard reset. Once that was done, and we were back online students continued to play with the code.
The robot learned how to sing the imperial march, and navigate remotely. It tried to sing the super Mario theme and we will rock you, but it needs more practice. We had a lot of help from this document to understand how the ASCII commands were converted to binary on the fly. There are some handy dandy codes to help write music, and get the robot to respond to what we wanted.
We had the idea to mount an old netbook to drive remotely. We imaged the laptop with PeppermintOS and added all the necessary python programs to talk to the iRobot.
Some students had the idea of using the web camera on the laptop to create a live video and audio stream so the robot had "eyes." Then we used an android script to allow an android device to become a remote control that the python script would allow input from. we sent the live "eye" feed onto the projector in the classroom and we were off driving around the school, entertaining students and staff with some simple music. As iRobot drove around students realized that the laptop screen revealed all our secret code to any bystanders. We had to figure out a way to hide the screen but keep the "eyes" open. With some Linux bash script know-how we added some code that shut off the screen when the robot would deploy, this way the precious code was safe from peering eyes.
Here are the files we used to drive the robot around the school.
Did you know that the first week in April is National Robotic Week.
Thank you to the Vermont students who are training us for the upcoming Robot Rodeo in May
~ from Vermont's fleet of robots traveling through Vermont schools
The Lothrop 2nd grade had a visitor - Ozobot! We learned how to code by hand with colors, then used Ozoblockly and our clever coding skills to make Ozo do great things. We learned shapes, math, and looping! Ozo is now off to visit Warren School. We hope he has fun times and learns great moves with the Warren students.
We have been studying magnets in pre-kindergarten and so the students were excited to see the magnetic blocks BUT then the power turned on and it blinked and moved. We were amazed and had so much fun seeing what the Cubelets could do.
Cubelets visited the Vermont Kindergarten Conference this past Friday and participated in the Coding, Robots and Computational Thinking Workshop. Educators at this workshop were give the Cubelet blocks and ask to figure out what they were. The discussion was fabulous and a lot of collaboration took place. They explored what would happen if blocks were taken out or arranged differently.
Meet Ferris. Ferris is actually the Wink robot from PlumGeek Software. The Wink robot has been designed to introduce programming to people who are interested as an entry point to learn how to write code and for experienced coders alike. Using the Arduino IDE open source platform, code can be written to activate a host of exciting features that are built into the robot. These features include blinking RGB lights, actuators for movement, proximity sensors for obstacle detection, light sensors for following light and line detection and for some Winks, a IR remote to control those behaviors.
I named my robot Ferris, because I had some challenges getting him to school each day. The challenge of setting up reminded me that sometimes Ferris just needed a day off. Now that I've broken him in, he's been pretty dependable and can do some exciting things.
The first hurdle has been introducing the Arduino programming to High School students who've never written code in the Arduino environment. PlumGeek has helped bridge the gap by providing a series of usable lesson plans and pre-loaded behaviors available for download on their website.
Fortunately, I've been working with a couple of classes at the Center for Technology in Essex. The Computer Systems technology class and PreTech classes have been able to play with Ferris. We've started doing basic coding, like learning how the lights operate, adjusting Ferris eyes to blink, change colors and emit different light levels. I'm working with a student at the moment on obstacle detection, which Ferris is really good at. The light detection sensor is very good, as Ferris seems to have a strong will to find a nice sunny space to relax in (don't we all). Here's a little of Ferris in action (my dog does not care for Ferris - you might hear her whine).
We have brainstormed a lot of names already: Tiny Tim, Battlefront Bot, Star Minecraft, Q2, and Little Smart are some of the front runners. It might be hard to decide on just one!
This week, 5th and 6th grade students at Fletcher Elementary worked on programming the Sphero to follow the Fibonacci Spiral. Students used the Tickle app in the classroom to code connected squares that form a spiral shape.
--
Emily DiGiulio Fletcher Elementary School 340 School Rd. Cambridge, VT 05444 (802) 849-6251
R2 Read 2 arrived right before Peoples Academy Middle School went on their extended winter break! Students had just enough time to start tinkering with our Sphero robot and learning what it can do. Our 7th grade students have been using their coding skills and the Tickle app for programming. We've taught R2 Read 2 some awesome tricks along the way- jumping and spinning across the library! (Video coming soon!) We are excited to continue learning and mastering our coding skills this month! Stay tuned...
Students at Richmond Elementary School (RES) had a great month
exploring Cubelets. Students in Grades K -4 had a chance to explore
them through after school programming as well as during school choice times
and in the enrichment classroom. We decided not to name the robot...as
each time we built it, it seemed to have a different personality. We
wonder if the next school will come up with a great name?!
Here are a few helpful hints from our time with the Cubelets (we also included these on cards to travel with the robot):
*
We used the following video (short and sweet) to give students an idea
of the various ways the could manipulate the six Cubelets (and to
challenge them to think beyond these seven ideas!) Students enjoyed how
each robot had a name and they paused the video and tried many of the
ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uULIlZFD6uE
*
We found that with six Cubelets and one power source that it was
challenging to have more than two students building a robot at a time.
(This was a challenge, because the building was so fun, and in high
demand.....but if we added more students then no one got to follow an
idea through to completion...especially the first week!)
*
One way we addressed this was by having Legos and the Lego extenders in a
different space. This allowed students to build and design add on
features while they were waiting to build with the Cubelets.
* We explored the idea of having students draw designs out....but the
creativity was more limited than if they built and tested directly on
the Cubelets!
* We had a flashlight accessible in
order to further play with light sensor. We also had a dark space in
the classroom so students could move their designs in and out of the
light without disrupting other class projects!
Overall
we really enjoyed our time with the Cubelets, and students were sad to
see them leave. We are very grateful to the Vermont Robot Rodeo, and
our sponsor Game Theory for this opportunity to learn and explore with a
new tool! We would love to add these to our classroom in the future,
and are looking for ways to fund a kit of our own.
We
are also excited to watch this blog and see what great things the next
school creates.Happy Trails Cubelets!!! (Perhaps we will meet up again
at Dynamic Landscapes??!)
Hello Friends.
In this picture one of our students is using littleBits, with littleBits we have been making many things, including the tickle machine the vibrating handshake and the flashlight.
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