In December all students at Richmond Elementary School participated in an Hour Of Code during their enrichment classes. This was an excellent chance for students to be exposed to the concepts of coding. After several years of Hour of Code at our school, as well as many teachers embracing coding for special projects in their classrooms over the last three years...students have developed great early coding skills.
This year I signed up to participate in the Vermont Robot Rodeo.
My teaching goal was for students to have an opportunity to advance
their coding skills as they made connections between hardware and
software. I feel that in elementary school the ability to connect
coding to the physical manipulation of materials is an awesome way to
build true and lasting understanding. I have also seen it increase
student engagement as the sharing of results is so transparent (i.e.
Robots roll across the floor or say something or react to something!)
This
year I chose to focus the use of robots to build coding connections in
our third grade classes(younger classes got exposure to the robots less
formally). We began our investigation by giving every student a chance
to explore what robots could do. During this period, we might use apps
that were more like a remote control versus coding and kids were
encouraged to play. After this exposure I challenged students to use
coding applications to control the robots and to make them 'do
something' deliberate and expected. Students jumped right in to meet
this challenge. They used Blockly and Tickle applications and developed
cool project ideas: making a robot draw something, dance to music,
greet others, create a light show, interact with another robot, pull a
toy on a path, make it through an obstacle course...to name a few! They
wrote many lines of code, tested and iterated to achieve their goal,
worked together and had a lot of fun. Several students pointed out that
this work was hard....but not because they wanted to stop.....but I
think they were just proud of themselves! And I was proud of their
persistence and drive to learn.
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| Kindergarten getting early exposure to coding skill through maze building and BeeBot |
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| Third Graders putting their coding skills to the test! |
The
Vermont Robot Rodeo is an amazing opportunity to expose students to
these coding connections and we are grateful to all of the sponsors who
provided funds to give our kids the chance to advance their coding
skills. We will be sad to send Dash and Dot to the next school--but we
are sure that they will learn as much as we did--and we will be watching
and checking out their work too.
I
look forward to watching as our RES students use all of the skills they
developed and applying this same persistence, thinking and
collaboration to other learning.
Below is a video that hilights student work with robots, coding examples and student reflections.
