Robotics 2 - Spring Break Camp - Day 2

The kids in Robotics 2 brought some amazing passion and energy to camp today!  I am incredibly impressed with what we were able to accomplish.  They were able to recall the parts of a robot with the correct vocabulary and they were able to transition into a more independent situation where students didn't need me to remind them step-by-step how to program the Edison Robots.  This led to a fantastic situation for any classroom - Individualized Learning.  The kids who where working on mastering the decimal form of a percentage of a second were coached through that.  Students who mastered the math quickly were able to move on and challenge themselves by adding more complicated code and programming their robots to interact with each other.

 Let me back up just a tad.  We started off the day reviewing computational thinking - the process of doing one step at a time.  We created our first basic maze in life-size fashion on the floor, wrote the code for it, then took turns calling out the code to the person pretending to be the robot.  Even the baby got in on it before going down for a nap - boy did the kids think that was a riot!  Then students worked on coding Edison to follow the same, though much smaller, maze.  Once they mastered the given maze they were instructed to draw their own and code Edison to complete it - not many completed this challenge so keep it in mind for a rainy day at home!

Then we learned how Edison can interact with drawn lines.  Edison has a line tracking sensor and can follow a black line or respond to a black line.  We learned a few more coding blocks such as "Speed" and "Turn OFF the Motors" all while playing with following our own drawn trails - a simple black marker and large sheet of paper does the trick! These are all activities that can me built upon at home after camp ends.  We spent some time today talking about how coding robots is a fairly complicated task and we will hardly ever get the math right on the first try.  After each task we sat as a group on the sofa and reflected on what went well and not so well and why we thought that.  We also brainstormed different ideas to troubleshoot problems such as accidentally poking holes in the paper that then cause Edison to get stuck!  I am continually impressed with the enthusiasm and perseverance that is shown by kids in robotics camps - something about robots helps us be a little more brave to try, fail, and try again.  Keep up the great work!