Blog Entry #2 - Robotics Kits

Raise your hand if you’re a teacher that has been asked to include innovative technology in your classroom with no training? This past year, I was asked to teach a robotics option course and I had to ask whether I would receive training in this field before teaching the students. The response I received was “No, but you can take the robotics kits home over the summer to learn.” Needless to say, I asked to teach a different option course for this school year with the promise that I would teach robotics in the future if I received training.   

This experience has inspired my blog post for today which will focus directly on robotics kits and how they may impact the learning of students. In the past, I have used Ozobots to teach mathematics, option courses and English. The thing about Ozobots is they are incredibly easy to use. In fact, the robot simply follows a colored path created by the user. So, the only coding involved for these robots is creating a different colored path using markers. Was the integration of Ozobots meaningful for my students learning? To be honest, no my students could have created the rise and run of a graph without the help of the Ozobots. Historically, the traditional methods I had used with pen and paper had taught students the concepts that they needed to learn. On the other hand, the Ozobots made this activity extremely engaging for my students and I did ultimately see a rise in comprehension of this math concept.  

That leads me to my guiding question for this blog post which is: 

Are there classroom activities that include robotics that can be meaningful and effective for student learning? 

Here is what I discovered: 

According to the book Ready, Set, Robotics, there are real-world occupations that use robotics extensively (Valenzuela, 2021). These occupations include agriculture in order to take care of the plants or navigate the fields, as well as, in healthcare for biomedical solutions like robotic exoskeletons. In my middle school classroom, it may be interesting to connect robotics studies to these meaningful real-world contexts (Valenzuela, 2021). For example, students could read the novel Out of my Mind, by Sharon M. Draper, and then use robotics kits to create some sort of accessibility tool for the main character Melody, who has Cerebral Palsy.  By making this connection to the real-world, it automatically gives students the opportunity to see the meaningful difference they could make.  

It may also be beneficial to review the skills that robotics kits teach students that are more closely linked to behavioral education than the curriculum. In the article An educational robotics course: Examination of educational potentials and pre-service teachers experiences (2019), the authors found that working with robotics helped students to increase their motivation, collaboration and problem-solving skills (p. 512). These are all valuable assets that students will need as they progress through school and into the future.  

So, what are some suggested robotics resources from professionals to use in your classroom (Valenzuela, 2021): 

• Lego WeDo Robot 
• VEX Robotics 
• Sphero  
• Ozobots 

Resources 

Sisman, B., & Kucuk, S. (2019). An educational robotics course: Examination of educational potentials and pre-service     teachers‟ experiences. International Journal of Research in Education and Science (IJRES), 5(2), 510-531.                        https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1205775.pdf 

 

Valenzuela, J. (2021). Get ready: Planning for using robotics. In ready, set, robotics!: Build computational thinking             skills in the K-8 classroom (p. 2). International Society for Technology in                             

    Education. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX8142900003/GVRL? u=queensulaw&sid=bookmark-                           GVRL&xid=322efb75