my name is Michael Van de pluie I am an assistant principal here at table k
primary school on the northwest coast of Tasmania as well as being an assistant
principal I'm also teaching science for two days a week so I teach science from
prep to grade 6 with robotics this was a grade 6 focus and we were looking at the
curriculum of digital technologies and we were looking at programming and
getting robots to do a set activity or a set set of instructions and we're
focusing mainly on duration and speed that work with robots now for three or
four years and and basically they are now exploring really nearly
independently some of these challenges that have the wrong offer so welcome to
robotics we're going to learn we're going to pull all the things that we've
learnt from last year into an activity ok so today's intention learning
intention is to understand how duration and steering can help navigate an xt
robot around a given object to challenge today is called around the world and we
want your robots to start on this line travel up to the world go around the
world without hitting it because that would be a bit messy and then come back
to this line ok now if you can do that the challenge will be to do it as
quickly as possible there's all about their estimation skills their way of
trying to solve that problem through through the use of duration in a move
block and the way that they use the steering where you go guys good luck I
modeled what I wanted to see and then it was for them to then explore that
program and explore the ways to move it
so what can you see what can you see it needs to improve what're you putting it
go it'll be faster but also it started to invited early so that duration needs
to be particularly with this lesson I was really just a guide I was just there
questioning them seeing if they if they understood or if they bit lost what
could they do to improve it what could they do to to make that challenge
complete that is a really nice turn Montana okay so we've got the duration
right I reckon we've got the turn right but it bumped into the world so what's
going to happen well how are you going to solve that where did you start on the
line where D reckon you should start
and
this is that one well done Amy Amy the second challenge is to speed it up now
we want a quick time
nice one an improvement and anyone seen improvement just a slight improvement 11
yet make it a little bit longer so it reaches that line and Dylan do you see
how it went off on an angle how could you make it so it's straight back make
the turn a fraction longer so see if you can improve it that way I really promote
that self-evaluation and that self thinking that critical thinking about
their program and/or their their work and their learning and it's really
important for kids to to express that to to talk about that to not be afraid to
to say oh well I've made a mistake in a real world situation how could this be
handy robot has to go up to a certain certain thing has to turn around it and
come back and run it under water okay so you're looking at robots ago underwater
they have to go and search for something they have to go and find something they
might have to take pictures of got going around and then coming back yep with the
conclusion we got it back to a focus of rural we got it back to a focus of
community we made sure that they understood that this type of programming
could be could be used a lot of those students had a little bit of difficulty
interpreting that it's something that I might need to work on work on a little
bit more with that group what could be the next challenge what could be
something that we could do next something that's a little bit more
advanced something a little bit different what could we do next I mean
Carl and I think that's an exciting way of teaching where you have the kids
thinking about the next step