Summer Robotics 2 Day 3

This afternoon the Robotics 2 camp finished up with a dance a party.  We reviewed computational thinking and how we will be more successful if we work out one piece of code at a time. Then we jumped into our challenge of using all 4 drive directions to make Edison dance.  I was impressed with how many different varieties of turns, twists, speed, and length of time were used.  The kids thought it was fantastic that they could pick a favorite song, I could play it over the speaker system, and they could have their Edison "dance" to the music.

 Our dance code was a fun adventure in creative coding. I could see the "choreography" happening in some student's minds as they thought about how they would like Edison to move to a Greatest Showman song or how would Edison do the Floss dance?

 After our break we learned how to make Edison turn on and off his lights.  We played around with the code to make Edison dance and turn on and off the lights. Our main coding focus today was on the Loop block, which makes the code repeat either a set number of times or forever.  The kids discovered the Look block on Wednesday so it was fairly easy for them to incorporate it into their dancing code. We even learned that you can put a Loop block around a few blocks, add more blocks, and put a loop block around all of it.

We had an amazing time learning together.  It was a ton of fun to watch the kids become confident in loading code onto Edison and playing around with writing the code.  It is awesome that Edison is open ended so all these kids can go home and continue creating new code challenges for their Edison.  Here are some example challenges to get your kids to do (or come up with your own!): 

• Drive around and obstacle, such as a cup or pencil case
• Drive around the border of a desk without driving off the edge
• Create a maze on a large piece of paper
• Create a maze using building blocks

Share with me what amazing challenge you can make your Edison do!  Share a video, pictures, or even just text on Facebook.com/InitiateLearning  I can't wait to see what you can accomplish!