A fantastic group of kids showed up for Robotics 2 Spring Break camp this afternoon. They brought so much knowledge and excitement about robots that at the end of our time today they weren't ready to go home! Everyone drew a robot on the front of their workbook today and we took turns sharing what we drew. We talked about the three parts of a robot (computer, sensors, actuators) and how there are many machines out there that aren't robots because they're missing one of the three main parts.
This class was assigned to find all the parts of their Edison Robot before we went over them as a class. This turned out to be a super fun exploration stage as some kids found the on/off switch and others weren't certain if they were allowed to turn it on and when they found out it was ok they were amazed at all the things Edison did right away.
We spent a big chunk of time talking about what decimals (to the hundredth place) meant. We first talked in terms of $1.00. If I took away a dime or $0.10 how much would I have left? Repeat until you get to zero. Then we started over with $1.00 and talked about what if I only took away a penny or $0.01? Repeat until you get to zero. We then tried to bridge the gap between money and time. We wanted 1.00 to be one second and any smaller decimal to represent a part of a second. This is a really important concept to understand as we start programming our robots. With the Edison bot we have to tell it how long to move in terms of seconds and since seconds are so long we have to use parts of seconds quite often.
Computational Thinking is the ability to think in a series of tasks, or a list, that is completed in order. We used the example of washing our hands: Close your eyes and imagine that you are going to wash your hands. You walk into the bathroom and turn off the water. You then dry your hands. Next you turn on the water and scrub your hands. Lastly, you scrub soap all over your hands and dry them on a towel. In the end, did you end up with clean hands and the faucet turned off? Doing things in the wrong order can really mess you up. The same is true for a robot. They have to do one step at a time. When we bake a cake we follow a recipe or cookbook. It's a list of instructions that we follow to be successful. We did our first coding challenge of drawing in the code for a series of instructions in the right order.
Once we had covered our basics it was time to tackle coding Edison with our computers and tablets. Edison is wonderful because we can use a web based coding software that doesn't require any downloads and loads the code to Edison through the headphone jack. Our first computer assignment was to load a code onto Edison. The code was pre-written so that we could just follow the process of how to load a code onto Edison.
There was an amount of troubleshooting the robots and connections and everyone was so fascinated with the code where Edison would follow a light source that we got carried away playing!
We spent just a little time at the very end of the class working on writing our own code to move Edison forward and to make him turn. Calling it quits for the day was extremely difficult since we were on such a roll! I can't wait for our next time together where we can really get into activities where we write out own code.
A peek inside our camp classroom:
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Robotics 2 is a first physical item coding class for students 7-10 years old. Students learn the parts of a robot and use a drag and drop programming language called EdBlocks to program their robot to complete different tasks. Interested in joining us for Robotics 2 Summer Camp?
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