There’s a place for lessons involving robots in every grade and every subject—not just science and math but English and social studies too.
Editor's Note: This article was originally posted on Edutopia, a foundation dedicated to telling the stories of what's working to transform K-12 education.
Content and elective teachers looking to incorporate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) as well as computer science (CS) into their curriculum can consider robots and robotics while still keeping the instructional focus of their class.
For example, to enhance a literature lesson, students can represent the journey of literary characters through programmed robots. In math class, students can find distance and speed traveled and calculate the time to run a program for their robot.
Moreover, teachers do not have to abandon their entire curriculum to participate in STEM. Instead, implement one project or performance task a semester, and connect it to learning in your area for no more than two to three weeks at a time. Keep things simple, and focus on fun and the intended learning.
Here’s how to start, along with resources and recommendations.
In the real world, robotics is a branch of engineering that involves the conception, design, manufacture, and operation of robots. This field also overlaps with CS.
In the classroom, educational robots are excellent for teaching kids fundamental engineering design and programming skills while allowing them to see and interpret code results in real time. Additionally, we can tie in literacy, physical science, and mathematics (among other topics) while helping them develop professional skills such as planning, teamwork, and perseverance. Here’s a handy infographic uplifting the skills we can help learners develop.
To keep the learning authentic, here is some context we can make for students:
When teaching robotics in the classroom (not after school), choose robots that require less elaborate builds and not a lot of cleanup.
The following companies offer options for all grades at various price points:
Take these four calculated steps to help your students familiarize themselves with the technology in tandem with understanding key concepts and programming, regardless of your robot or platform.
1. Know the hardware. By exploring tutorials through play, students can learn how to identify and categorize the major components of their robots. Good categories to begin with include structure, motion, electronics, and other tools. Be sure to provide an explanation for each category.
2. Build the robot (when applicable). This is a great entry point for students new to robotics, and many younger kids will love this step.
3. Learn the functions of gears, motors, sensors, and other components. This step helps significantly to elucidate key concepts in automation and robotics engineering into practice and provides context for the use of the components associated with the robot you choose.
4. Learn how to program. Most devices will have built-in missions, which enable students to see how to make the robot move with motors and respond to touch or motion with sensors. As they become more accustomed to the built-in programs, they can start making their own programs using visual programming blocks. For example, the block coding option in the Sphero Edu app is built on Scratch—check out this tutorial I created for first-time programmers.
Implementing an entire robotics unit may be a bit much or appear daunting for a content teacher—therefore, try a performance task where the product your students create is a program that enables their robot to complete a task. See this link for a template inspired by the GRASP (Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Products) model by Jay McTighe, along with my example for you to reference as you design your own.
When designing your performance tasks, here are some logical curricular connections for content teachers to consider.
Jorge Valenzuela is also the author of Rev Up Robotics: Real-World Computational Thinking in the K–8 Classroom.