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