Session 3 - Recording our ideas

So this week we started by recaping our last sessions work.

By the end of the session last time, most of the children had managed to get the Robosapien to wave.

Today we continued this but with an important addition - we had to record our instructions so that we can use this information to programme using the computer in the next session.

The session work a lot better than previous weeks nearly all the groups now had more confidence with the robot and only one group still couldn't mange to control the robot well.

This raises issues with groupings - the children have to work in groups - I let my children choose there groups. You need a range of ability in a group, those groups who where not working as well, where the lower ability children or very little interest in ICT. One of my all girl groups was the worst overall.

Again the most powerful teacher tool and assessment tool was to talk to the groups and listen to what they where saying. The task is also a postive group work task. It was important to make sure that the groups did record what they where doing - this was dfficult at times (as you can see from the videos) as the children wanted to keep on working with the robot.

Check out the videos and photos.

Next Time (hopefully) - into the ICT suite to use the Go-Robo software.

Session 2 - Moving arms.

This week we continued with last weeks work - completing the control sheet.




We met with varying degrees of success with this. Some children managed to to record a number of commands, while others seemed to get stuck. While many wanted to make it work, some just gave up if they couldn't make it work.



After 20minutes on this we fed back any of the new commands that we had discoveried. I then set the children the challenge of getting the robot to wave with both arms. I did give the children some guidance in how to move the arms - mainly for those groups who hadn't recorded many commands.


They most useful tool to assist groups was good questioning, How did you do this? How are you going to move one arm up? etc...


In terms of ways to improve - even though the exploring task is interesting. In order to focus more initially next time I would start with getting the Robosapien to wave. Thus focusing on the more basic and useful commands. Then we would move on to find out what else he he can be programmed to do.























Next time - how can we record this information?