New Pacheco Outreach Lesson

This week was the first week of Lesson 2 of our outreach workshop in Pacheco elementary school. This year we changed our lessons from the previous years by introducing a new robot, the scribbler robot. The Computer Engineering department here in Cal Poly was kind enough to let us borrow 10 of these robots to use during our 3rd and 4th week of outreach.

These robots have a GUI software were instructions can be dragged and placed and that makes the programming of these robots fairly simple. Using this software, we have implemented a lesson plan to show the students a little bit more about how programming works and allow them to tell the robot what to do.

The concept of programming can be abstract to some of the kids so we are trying to improve the lesson so the kids can wrap around the idea of following instructions one at a time and seeing how the robot can only execute one instruction at a time. The whole in the middle of the robot is a spot to place a marker so that the path can be tracked and compared to the instructions that were given to the robot.

The kids all really seemed to like being able to tell the robot what to do and seeing the end result in paper. Though some kids were at different levels when it came to designing different paths and shapes, all of the ICEX students that went to help did a great job of making sure that all the kids were engaged and were getting something out of the lesson.

The next lesson will consist of using binary encoder robots that are also the same ones we will be taking to Malta for the outreach there. I love seeing all the kids super excited about robots and I hope we are making a difference with these kids and the kids we will meet in Malta.

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Cecilia