Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 1, Programming and Robotics (3rd-4th)
Welcome to Programming and Robotics! It was such a pleasure meeting our talented students; we have a wonderful week ahead of us. We established classroom rules as a community and explored decision-making strategies. Today we talked about evaluating decisions and learned to rank them (minor, moderate, and significant). As a class, we evaluated real-world scenarios/decisions, then talked about which merit discernment and which are best to decide quickly to keep projects moving. Rock-paper-scissors, anyone?
This week we will be using the LEGO Education app and LEGO SPIKE Prime robot kit for our hands-on activities. As part of our professional development, we completed a tutorial to become acquainted with the components: hub (“brain”); medium and large motors; and touch/force, color, ultrasonic, and gyro sensors.
Our newly formed companies explored the nearly $130B toy market, then set to work creating their first prototype. Students brainstormed ideas for a new story-telling toy with five-story events, then created a program to communicate by assigning a sound for each event with a specific color. We used word blocks, a graphical drag-and-drop programming language, to explore programming data types and control flow statements. We then used loops and conditional statements to provide a wider range of story options for our customers.
Next, we built a dancing robot which we will use tomorrow morning to learn how to synchronize motor movements to keep rhythm with lights and beats.
Dinner table questions:
- What three things make a robot?
- What is a prototype?
- How do manufacturers assign an age range to a product?
- How is math used to create toys?
- What does the future of toys look like?
- How are toy companies working to make more sustainable solutions?
We look forward to continuing more learning tomorrow!