Hello World,
Move My Robot is a blog with ideas for programming and robotics projects for elementary school children. The idea behind this blog is to inspire more children to learn to code.
Most bloggers like to share the story behind their blogs with the readers. Here is mine… One evening about four years ago ago, my child came home and happily announced that he worked with a robot that day. Curious, I asked him what it was like. He said it looks like a bee, with buttons on it that you can program to move in all different directions. He offered to show it to me the next day and delivered on his promise when I went to pick him up after school. His teacher said that the school had bought a few Pro-Bots/Bee-Bots from Terrapin (http://www.bee-bot.us). As a computer engineer, this was right up my alley and I instantly offered to help introduce them in the classroom. Couple of weeks later, I was teaching the entire grade level, about 130 students…
I worked with the school to expand the program to reach every single classroom, from Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 5. Labeled as the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math) program, it now brings instruction in Computer Science to about 900 students, as part of the enrichment curriculum. I chair the program, leading a team of around 50 parent volunteers. I also continue to teach my child's classroom, as well as a couple of other classes. A good number of the lesson plans listed in this blog are being used as part of the formal STEAM syllabus in our school in grades 1 - 5.
Several of the projects that you find in this site were designed by me for teaching Computer Science with Pro-Bots as my instruction aid, since that was the primary tool available to me when I started this endeavor.
Scratch from MIT (scratch.mit.edu) is my absolute favorite for teaching programming and you will find several ideas for Scratch projects here. I also design lesson plans for Arduino, with S4A (Scratch for Arduino) as the IDE; these lessons are currently being used in our Grade 5 classrooms. In addition, I tinker around with other robotics units and you may find a few projects associated with that...
I worked with the school to expand the program to reach every single classroom, from Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 5. Labeled as the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math) program, it now brings instruction in Computer Science to about 900 students, as part of the enrichment curriculum. I chair the program, leading a team of around 50 parent volunteers. I also continue to teach my child's classroom, as well as a couple of other classes. A good number of the lesson plans listed in this blog are being used as part of the formal STEAM syllabus in our school in grades 1 - 5.
Several of the projects that you find in this site were designed by me for teaching Computer Science with Pro-Bots as my instruction aid, since that was the primary tool available to me when I started this endeavor.
Scratch from MIT (scratch.mit.edu) is my absolute favorite for teaching programming and you will find several ideas for Scratch projects here. I also design lesson plans for Arduino, with S4A (Scratch for Arduino) as the IDE; these lessons are currently being used in our Grade 5 classrooms. In addition, I tinker around with other robotics units and you may find a few projects associated with that...
One of my biggest philosophies in teaching Computer Science to kids is to tie in the concepts with what children learn in their classrooms and see around them. A lot of programming concepts can be abstract and I feel that seeing their application to the immediate environment helps to better foster the child’s understanding of the subject. Hence, most of the project ideas that you see here would be an application to topics in the school syllabus, pertaining to the age/grade level. Keeping things fun for kids is just as important, hence included are some “art projects" that I designed for the younger kids; these were the most favorite among the 7 and 8 year olds that I taught four years ago.
I hope that you and your kids find these projects interesting and fun. Thank you for taking the time to visit.
Wishing you oodles of fun with your programming/robotics projects!!
--Yamini