Can You Escape the Death Star? Maze Activity

Are you brave enough to traverse the Dark Side?  Solve your way to the Escape Pod so you can join the rebel forces in defeating Darth Vader the Sith Lord.  

When will you ever use this in real life, you ask.... well here you go!  Nothing like defeating evil with Algebra to see the relevance of multi-step equations in the real world.  We never know when we need to fight a Star War!

And of course... I always go a little overboard....

These are just characters taped to solo cups to place over the Sphero to add come character.  Below is a video of how they move.

This summer I received a couple of grants for Spheros in my math classroom.  I've been working on integrating STEM and STEAM into my class as a way of engaging and motivating learners.  What is a Sphero you might ask?  

I saw these a couple of summers ago at the Texas Regional Collaborative in Austin, Texas.  I have played with them a few times and even brought them up to school at the end of last year.  I wrote a grant through WeTeach_CS and DonorsChoose.org.  Blessedly I received both of them!  The WeTeach Mini Grant allowed me to realize a life long dream too!  I received my first ever 'bigcheck'!  

He went on a  number of adventures the rest of the summer which you can see on my classroom Twitter: @cbhsrichmath.

Immediately I started brainstorming.  I have a bad habit of going overboard so I wanted to slowly bring Sphero into my classroom.  I have already integrated Ozobot into my class so I just needed a few assignments to work in.  Robotics and coding are so important to basic life skills as I've previously wrote about on my blog.  They teach fundamental life and math skills so even just 'playing' can be great learning.

So Sphero..... Hmmmm..... there are a ton of great resources to intorduce into the class like the following Teachers Pay Teachers Activities from Miss Talented and Gifted:

Bundle 1

Bundle 2

The Twister activity is fabulous!  When we did it at a STEM Camp they loved it and really applied their coding.

With my students, I wanted to work it in to the curriculum as an initial interest motivator.  So I thought, 'hey, they could drive it through a maze!'  Then I thought just take any maze WS  and print it poster size to put on the ground.  I have a bunch from Algebra Accents I could use! BUT.... this is me and I wanted a Star Wars themed one!! Of course I couldn't just use what I had, could I?!?!?

Enter Can You Escape From the Death Star?

I printed it in poster mode from PDF at 625%.  This made it 9 sheets by 5 sheets and the perfect size to navigate Sphero through to the Escape Pods.  Every pair/group/individual will solve their problems to navigate through the maze on paper.  They will then drive their Sphero through it all on the floor maze!

I added a students WS to show their work.

At first, they needed some time to familiarize themselves with it and play.  I demonstrated how to connect and do the basic drive commands for this activity.  We will get more into the coding later.

The students worked hard to get to the fun.  they were able to master the mechanics and even practice their 'escape' plan to show me for their grade tomorrow.  Below are the Sphero Mini's which have a totally different drive dynamic in my opinion. 

As always, I have provided copies of the activities in Word and PDF.  The fonts I used were Star Jedi and standard Stencil in Word. 

Download the Maze and Student WS here for FREE!

For any keys, please feel free to email me at camfan54@att.net from your school or professional account.  I've had students try and email for keys in the past but luckily their email said student! 

Have a gallactically great day!
Lisa

Let's Code and Roll... the Ozobot DICE!

I was really trying to work in the Ozobots once more this year!  We did not get them until December so we only had a semester, in addition to the shortened curriculum because of Hurricane Harvey, to use them.  I get so easily excited that I always end up over doing but we had some 'extra' time to work on geometry and I decided to work in a little coding.  How I feel about coding in math has been communicated quite extensively by me.  My colleagues and friends are surely sick of it but I can not see a better fit than order of operations and accuracy in math.  Beyond that are careers, life lessons, and of course interactions beyond the standard social media.

Read about my initial ideas and Ozobot lessons here.

Making Math Ozo-some!

I also wrote more about coding and math here.

Guest Blog: Ozobots in Algebra 1

So here comes the end of the year.  Kids are tired.  State tests are taken.  They need some motivation and engagement to get through the final haul of what has been a roller coaster Texas school year.  I decided a nice poster project to round out the Geometry Unit would be nice.  I could not have been more happy with the results.  The students blew me away with their coding and concepts mastery.  It was so rewarding and a great way to further practice our coding in math!

I first created dice with a combination of coding and geometry concepts.  There are 4 unique dice.  2 are numbered and 2 are lettered so you can mix it up.  I printed all the numbers on blue and letters on orange and laminated them.

For the instructions, I put the codes for all the dice under each number so they could just circle which ones they rolled.  I also created a rubric on the back.  I also stated to roll a dice and complete the action then roll again.  Some groups did all their roles then created so it is completely up to you.

 I also encouraged adding extra to it as well.  Many kids were so excited that they were scared to add more and mess it up.  I loved their excitement and pride in their work.  One young lady even asked we send the video to her Mom 😍 They just watched their Ozobot perfectly travel the line for about 15 minutes.  It was fabulous!

I provided one piece of the gridded chart paper to help with the geometry concepts.

One of the discussions we had was what happened when Ozobot chose left instead of right or got stuck somewhere?  All groups had worked that out and accounted for it in their projects.  It was educational magic!!

I have since firther developed in, incorporating space and fine turning where they get an even number of Geometry concepts and coding!

Get all my resources from the Ozobot Classroom Lesson Library for FREE here!

As an additional fun note, we did this activity with a Texas theme in my WeTeach_CS face-to-face!  This was teachers completing it and below is one of the completed ones....

Enjoy!

Lisa

Ozobot Geometry Challenge!

Oh my sweet little Bot!  How the students and I have adored thee!  This year has been a unique experience working computer science basics of coding in to my math classroom.  Expanding and applying math in with robotics was rewarding and engaging.  You can read about my previous experiences at the links below.

Math is Ozo-some!

Ozobotting Quadratics

We used them again to review and apply geometry concepts prior to the Geometry Unit.  On the Ozobot site, there is a great task card challenge for middle school by Erin Wilson. 

Download it here for FREE!

For my students, I wanted some higher level concepts and tasks so I developed my own task cards.  

I also provided cm graph paper for them to use.  I had them each complete a minimum of 4 tasks and if they realized multiple ones could be done within the same item, then I let them and secretly cheered behind their back for the thought processing.  It was not super intense and nice little integration into the content.

To prepare, I made one copy of the task cards and laminated them.  They were all placed on the back counter and students chose which one they wanted.  After completing, they took it back to the counter and chose another one.  That way they were not all doing the same tasks and I didn't have to copy and cut a bagillion cards (or store them). Win-win. 😀

I also cut the FREE Ozobot Practice sheet code templates up and provided them with 3,4 and end-line u-turn code templates if they needed.  This helped them having to get a new sheet for corrections.  You may download these from Teachers Pay Teachers for FREE here.  Thank you Macs Store for the great resource!

I included some teacher notes and the Texas TEKS standards.

Incorporating coding into my math classroom has been an incredible experience for my students.  Seeing math and being engaged has shown unique growth and attention to detail.  I can't wait to see how much more I can use it!

You may download all my resources from the Ozobot Classroom Lesson Library here for FREE!

Thank you to Erin Wilson for the fabulous activity and inspiration!

Enjoy,
Lisa