Students excitedly take apart old computers at our 2012 Williamsburg, MA Science Fair and learn about computers in the process.
Check out the level of excitement of Tori and Bella as they used some great teamwork and engineering to produce a really fast robot dragster using 3 chained gears.
We have a great estimation and measurement lesson for K kids that uses BeeBots. Kids first estimate the distance between two marks of some kind (I use masking tape). There are a number of these around the room (usually 8 or 9). The lesson works great and it is so exciting to see students start to estimate the BeeBot steps needed to get from point A to point B. They will estimate visually, use their hands, and use the BeeBots to estimate. The difficulty has always been capturing their work. I like to be able to see how they did on their estimating and measuring after the lesson is over. It’s hard to check in with the whole class during the actual lesson, especially repeatedly.
Kids have had trouble with the workpaper I created for them. It looks like this.
Here’s the new and improved paper.
I hope the new formatting will make the writing task much easier for kids.
I updated the PK and K curriculum maps. There were some minor mistakes and a non-optimal order for K. See the Resources Page for new downloads. I updated the complete PK-6 map too to include the PK and K changes.
I updated the Resources Page to include Tech Tips and a separate Teaching Tips documents. Also, I have updated the Grade 6 curriculum map. See previous post for why but basically I simplified the open-ended challenge and it works much better!
In other news, I finished the first draft of a book on elementary robotics. I started to write a paper and just could not stop. I am very excited about this project and hope to say more soon as I am looking at different publishing options right now.
We had an extended sixth grade class today. Students were challenged to design and build the fastest robot car they could. Last week, the measured the velocity of the standard robot car built from the LEGO directions. Those went about 1 foot/second at 75% power and about 1.25 ft/sec at 100% power. We discussed ways to make faster cars especially since we can’t get a faster motor. Ideas they had were to make lighter, to change the tire size, and to use gears. The latter had to be strongly emphasized by me and reviewed. This class has only 2 years of robotics experience and did not experience gears and gear ratios like the current kids coming up. I hope this will not need as much direct instruction in future years.
I was excited to give them the LEGO NXT Resource Kits this year, which have tons of extra parts including many interesting gears, tires, and wheels. There was a lot of rebuilding, which is normal, as kids discovered how to build a car without directions. Many teams made cool cars but did not really pay enough attention to the goal, to make a faster car. Some thought a bigger wheel would make the car go faster. I’m not sure but I think it’s the same if the speed of the motor is the same. Smaller wheels will turn faster but also not cover as much ground. You can make a faster car by having the motor drive a large gear, which then drives a smaller gear, which then drives the wheel.
Two teams were able to have a testable prototype today. The first car went at 1.43 ft/second and did NOT use gears to make the car faster.
The second team successfully used gears to increase the speed. Their car is called Lightning. The team was so proud when I announced to the class that they now held the speed record of 2.5 feet/second! It really booked right along. Made me feel really good to see them so happy. I was also pleased that I seemed to have finally gotten the open-ended challenge for grade 6 right. The one I had last year had some problems (too hard, took too long).
Can’t wait to see what next week will bring!
I recently noticed a significant jump in my son’s art skills. Truth be told, he was the one that noticed. He came home from school very excited to draw saying, “Dad, I write like a sixth grader!” (He was a little mixed up on the difference between “draw” and “write”, it turns out.) He made a sudden jump from drawing stick figures to drawing filled in figures.
When I asked him if he learned this at art class, he said that he had not but had practiced and learned on his own, at school.
It is interesting that the arms come out of the waist consistently. When I said that his drawing where great and that I could show him one thing to make them even better and draw a basic filled in figure with the arms coming out the shoulder, he attempted to make the change but shortened the torso to almost nothing.
So what’s the point of all this ? I have been thinking that these development stages and the jumps between them are commonplace, if not ubiqitous. Piaget mapped them out for cognitive development and there has been similar work for social-emotional development. Part of my research at school is to determine if kid’s engineering skills have similar jumps. I will be giving the same kids the same engineering task every year from K to 6 to see if similar jumps occur.
I have been busy and not had a chance to blog. However, there is a lot going on and I have some great topics in the queue. I was one of a handful of teachers out of 1100 applicants to be named to the LEGO Education Advisory Panel, which is very exciting. There is a great group of teachers in an online community discussing robotics education. LEGO is bringing together this summer to try out new products and share with each other. I am writing a what started out as a paper and is turning into small book. I am planning to use to this as matierial for one of the 2 NSF grants we are planning to apply for. We have been doing some interested work with grades 1 and 2 with Lego WeDo and I continue to learn new things with every class. I also got to teach my son’s K class BeeBots, which was a blast.
Here’s another example of natural engineering I saw at school a few weeks ago. A group first and second grade girls made these ice castles. It was part of a creative, fantasy line they had invented. We need to tap this natural engineering instinct more inside the classroom.
Here’s a photo of our second grade classroom. This is one of the few teachers I know who tries to continue the use of blocks during class time beyond kindergarten. I think it is important to provide building opportunities, whether unstructured like this or structured beyond kindergarten. When I taught third grade, I always had a take apart center where I would put out old tools and old typewriters, electronics, and other stuff to take apart. This is especially important for our boys, I think. I know that many engineers, like myself, recall having closets full of taken apart stuff in our childhoods.
