Robotics

We are very excited to have some newly purchased 'Edison' robots at school. These are available to

all teachers to use with their classes, but as I organised them and set them up the Quest kids got to use them first. Some have used them with me before at Science class or in Quest (I have my own set of 8).  We looked at programming as being like a recipe - giving instructions to the robot. We also looked at how robots can help us (and times when robots go wrong - have you seen the videos of roomba robotic vacuums running over dog poo ? Ewww!!!) When using robots it's good for kids to see that it is a process. We think, plan, try something, and if it doesn't work as we wanted then we change something.  This is very much in line with the engineering process that the year 5&6's used for our rocket challenge - Ask (what do we want it to do, what;'s the brief?), Imagine, Create, Improve. Here's a slightly expanded illustration of that process.


It's important for kids to see that problem solving is part of the process - great for those with perfectionist tendencies to see that mistakes are ok (and inevitable when programming) and can be worked through. We can ask for help if we're struggling and that's ok - its part of problem solving.
These robots are great as they are hardy, and scaleable - they can be used from 4 year olds (or younger) up to adults. They have pre-programmed barcodes for easy use, and then 3 programming platforms - Edblocks (which most of my groups used), Edscratch - like scratch programming and a step up from Edblocks, and EdPy - based on 'python' programming language, which is aimed for high school aged kids. I had a few try Edscratch (because they wanted to try something harder) and one even had a go at EdPy! It's so great for our gifted kids to be able to choose the level of challenge that suits them!  Edison can sense colour, light, sound, can make sounds and lights go, follow lines, sumo wrestle, etc etc. Edison is also compatible with lego, which adds to the fun - as you can create new looks for Edison. So many possibilities - we'll use them again for sure!