{"id":10191,"date":"2015-04-22T14:34:32","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T04:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/?p=10191"},"modified":"2022-07-31T17:07:22","modified_gmt":"2022-07-31T07:07:22","slug":"a-week-in-the-life-1-play-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/a-week-in-the-life-1-play-well\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in the Life #1: Play Well!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second of probably fourteen posts, each chronicling in detail the ins and outs of my Robotics class. I teach an introductory course using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 set. My students are 7th graders who are required to take the course and may not necessarily have any background in programming\/building. My school is on a trimester schedule so the course runs for thirteen weeks at a time. For this particular trimester I have one class of twenty-four students and one class of thirty-four students. I meet each class for one 50 minute period each day, five days a week. I have thirty-four computers in my classroom and one EV3 kit for every two students. I\u2019ve been teaching this class in its current form for two years, though I\u2019ve been teaching Robotics for eight all together.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you’re following my posts you know I started with week 13 from last trimester<\/a> because I wanted to show how my class looked doing a totally new project – both the good and the bad. So this post truly covers the first week of my class.<\/p>\n

After initial introductions and classroom procedures I always begin my classes with the following learning target:<\/p>\n

I can use manipulation and observation to determine the various properties of LEGO pieces.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the learning target I use for my beginning of course lesson plan that I blogged about here earlier.<\/a><\/p>\n

There are a few reasons why I use this activity on the first day:\u00a0 1) My year starts new every 13 weeks (trimester schedule) but I have no time between the end of one trimester and the beginning of the next; sometimes robotics’ kits are just not ready to be distributed. 2) It helps me identify any trouble students that I may want to watch closely when I hand them a $300 kit the next day. 3) It helps me identify any pairs of students that maybe shouldn’t be working together. 4) It’s fun!<\/p>\n

I don’t want to repeat the whole lesson here (click this link<\/a> if you want to see it). Here’s a quick summary: Students are given the grey and black pins and told to write down five differences based just on observation. Then they are given beams to put the pins into and asked to use manipulation to come up with some more differences. This leads to a discussion of friction and the possible uses of these pins and ends with a call to use this method of observation and manipulation throughout the class.<\/p>\n

Here are some of the results I got from groups this time around: (click on any image for a bigger version)<\/p>\n