Byron Center — Several cardboard grandmas faced the dangers of being run over by reindeer in Countryside Elementary’s STEM classroom on the last day before winter break.
No real grandmas or live reindeer were harmed before the holidays; STEM teacher Christy Manker covered mini programmable robot balls with a paper cup decorated with pipe cleaner antlers and red noses.
Third-graders used iPads with the robots’ software, adjusting speed and distance to drive the “reindeer” and knock over the paper grandmas.
“We’re running grandma over, like the song,” one student said.
In the days leading up to break, Manker said she needed a lesson plan that could harness their excitement and align with the current unit on computer education.
“We’re learning how to code by playing coding games, so I thought I’d make the goal-oriented challenges holiday themed,” she said.
Older students got to use the “reindeer” robots, and both grade levels got to drive the Dash robots and Ozobots.
Manker added: “Kids really like robots.”
Conquering Coding Challenges
“Go Dash go!” second-grader Cienna Hammersmith shouted, while her partner, Charlotte Mieras, drove the Dash robot using the tablet to push gift bows out of a taped-off triangle.
“We control him,” Cienna explained, gesturing to the controls on the tablet’s screen. “This is how you move his head, and this is how you make him go forward.”
Manker said having the students manually determine Dash’s movement through coding on the tablet is more difficult than just driving the robot, like a remote-controlled car.
“They have to think about the speed and direction they want to go,” she said.
Manker also explained the classroom theme this year: Make the invisible visible.
“We know these things work, but why and how do they work? Someone had to design or code something to make it work, like pre-programmed microwave buttons or asking (an Amazon) Alexa to play a song. Someone had to program that.”
For another robot challenge, students colored red, green and blue code sequences on a Christmas tree coloring page for the Ozobots to follow.
“The Ozobots follow the dark lines on paper using his sensors,” second-grader Harrison Hoffmaster said. “He only follows lines, and if there aren’t any lines he’ll get confused.”
Across the room, Anna Armstrong and Diya Naresh created sequences using arrow buttons on a plastic mouse — a simpler coding robot — to give it a path to travel and have its magnetic nose tap the jingle bell.
After several attempts to press “up-right-right-up-down,” they quickly discovered the mouse had a mind of its own.
The mouse veered off their coded path and started to go backward off the table. Exclaimed Diya: “We didn’t tell him to do that!”
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