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Notes for Teachers

This lesson was done over a span of a few weeks with my Gifted 7th graders. I see them every Friday for about an hour.

Lesson took two days; 45-60 minutes.

List of Materials

RVR Sphero Robots
RVR Sphero Introduction
Chromebooks or IPADS
Access to books; simple reading

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Standards

7th Grade Computational Thinking:Subconcept: Modularity (M)

7.AP.M.1 Decompose problems into parts to facilitate the design, implementation, and review of programs. In order to design, implement and evaluate programs students will break down problems into smaller parts.

Subconcept: Control (C) 7.AP.C.1 Design and develop programs that combine control structures, including nested loops and compound conditionals. Control structures can be combined in many ways. Nested loops are loops placed within loops. Compound conditionals combine two or more conditions in a logical relationship (e.g., using AND, OR, and NOT), and nesting conditionals within one another allows the result of one conditional to lead to another.

AZ Technology Standards

6-8.4.a. Students engage in a design process for generating and testing ideas and developing innovative products to solve problems.

6-8.5.d. Students understand how automation works and apply algorithmic thinking to design and automate solutions.

AZ Science and Engineering Practices

plan and carry out investigations
use mathematics and computational thinking
construct explanations and design solutions

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Objective(s):

Today students will create an algorithm that will use the basic concepts of block coding for the VEX robot to travel a distance and when approaching a storybook, stop, and begin to read the book aloud.

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Agenda

Two Days: (45-60 minutes)

Day 1: Review or Introduction; depending on the experience of your students to VEX Robots and Block coding.

My students have had practice leading up to programming VEX. They were able to program their robots to travel around the room; go over objects, start/stop and points around the room etc.

Day 2: Students connected to their robots and were off and going! Now the challenge was to program the robot to drive over to a book, stop and begin reading; to bring to younger grades so the robot could celebrate Read Across America with younger students.

Using the app students typed into the speech coding block the story enabling the algorithm to then contain a read aloud code.

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Intro/Driving Question/Opening

How can our RVR’s play a part in Read Across America with the younger students on campus?

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Hands-on Activity Instructions

Students work in partners.
Students used their chromebooks and the RVR app through Google Play as well as Clever.
I created a Class prior so that they could save their work.
I would definitely use two days for students to sketch out a game plan as to how they will solve the problem.
Students had fun exploring the basics of the RVR on the 1st day; then onto a challenge the 2nd day.

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Assessment

Students’ assessment at the end of the challenge was their ability to be successful with the final product: Creating an algorithm that programs the RVR to drive over to s book, stop, and begin reading.

Younger students were the final judge of their efforts!

Students could snip their final code and upload it into a Google doc to share or submit.

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Differentiation

Strategic partnerships can benefit learners.

Provide a template as needed.

Have a variety of simple text books for this lesson for students to choose from.

Remediation

Extension/Enrichment

This lesson could definitely be extended to include various grade-level text.

This could be recorded and done on the announcements.

We could create an RVR read-aloud library and upload then into a Google folder for later use.

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