Name ofUnit Intro to Simple Robotics
Author(s) Charlie and Michelle
School Josiah Quincy
Teacher Ronnie Ho
Brief Description this is a unit that is designed to ease students in to ways of thinking when designing lego robots and coding them
Grade(s) 4th
Keywords lego
Number of Weeks 10
Week 1 Spaghetti Towers- kids are given a finite number of pieces of spaghetti, a length of string,  a length of masking tape, and a marshmallow and are asked to build the tallest free standing structure that they can in 20 minutes. -promotes critical thinking -introduces finite materials -learning to start building -learn that it’s ok to fail
Week 2 Robo-Instructions/think like a computer robo-instructions- one of the stompers will act like a robot and the other will work with the kids to design a code for making the STOMPER do a task. think like a computer- kids are split up into groups of two, and they are all given the same colored blocks in the same shapes and sizes. one of the kids will first make an arrangement out of his blocks, an then the send child must replicate the blocks from instructions from the first child. the second child cannot look at the 1st child’s construction, and the first child must be very specific when describing their design
Week 3 Silly walks with on brick programming

*comments* initially was hesitant to show kids videos of previous silly walks because we didn’t want them to just copy the ideas in the video, gave very open instructions that they had to make the robots move in a direction without using wheels, unfortunately they didn’t receive the instructions well and tended to get frustrated, some progress with only (2/10 groups)

Week 4 Silly walks with lego mindstorms programming

*comments* continued to work with the kids on silly walks, created a couple of basic examples to give them idea of what we were looking for, though they did exactly as we thought they would and about (6/10 groups) then copied the designs we made, they later adapted them to be a little more original though!

Week 5 touch sensor activity

*comments* worked with the touch sensor and then they wanted to work with the ultrasonic sensors, they focused more on on brick programming, also they rebuilt their robots so the sensors would work a bit better.

Week 6 ultrasonic sensor activity

*comments* continued to work with their robot designs from the previous class

Week 7 light sensor activity

*comments* the kids started to use lego mindstorms, though we had a lot of problems with handling kids fighting over the laptops, so collaboration was unfortunately minimized, focused mainly on getting the kids to understand that a computer runs things linearly and how to optimize their code that the way that their code made sense(i.e. not just dragging all the actions into a line, but making parallel lines of code and ordering)


Week 8 animal replica project kids will use what they learned in

*comments* decided to scrap the animal project because the kids needed more time working with mindstorms and NXT’s. continued with a lesson on the light sensor and the sound sensor and got the kids to integrate these sensors into their robots. gave them a challenge of getting their robot to move around a corner using sensors

Week 9 animal replica project

*comments* kids continued to work with lego mindstorms, had a lot of difficulty with understanding the concept of while loops (default loop in lego mindstorms), so we worked on that concept to help refine their code.

Week 10 animal replica project

*comments* continued to teach groups about coding, they had the kits for about a week and a half after our final lesson so they had some more time to tinker with the kits. all in all i think that the entire curriculum was difficult to implement because we had little control over the kids ( our teacher didn’t have much control to begin with) though the kids that took interest seemed to learn a lot.

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