Friday, July 13, 2018

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.



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!






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

2 comments:

Ladsit said...

Again, I'm lovin' your ideas. What a great way to bring STEM into the classroom for a relatively inexpensive price point. One question: do you have to use the provided pens or will any markers work? How long do the markers last? Couldn’t find a way to reorder them.

Lisa Richardson said...

I think I answered this on Twitter so sorry about the repeat. You can use regular crayola markers and they sell them on Amazon in dozen of one color sets for about $7!!