Sunday, September 29, 2019

An Ozobot Homecoming Parade....Created and Coded By Our 3rd Graders!

The third grade teachers and I have been collaborating on and creating ways to bring more innovative learning opportunities through robotics and coding to their students this year.
We will be Skyping and learning with Sphero in October, reading and discussing wonderful picture books like How To Code A Rollercoaster by Josh Funk and Rox's Secret Code, and last Friday, we kicked off this exciting work with our new Ozobot Evo Classroom Kit...and WOW, was it awesome!

In fact, this first experience with robotics and coding brought something very special to our students with a little Ozobot Homecoming Parade!  With that day being the day all of our students would go outside to watch the annual homecoming parade in Van Meter, we thought this would be a fun tie in for our kids.
To start the day, we brought all three sections of third grade into one classroom so we could tell them about the Ozobot Homecoming Parade they would be creating all morning long. 
First, we share a video called, 

How To: Color Codes from Ozobot, which explains to the students how to code the tiny robots by creating color codes with four different colors of markers. 

We explained that they would be put into small groups and each group would get a big piece of white butcher paper, a Ozobot robot, a set of markers and lots of other fun craft supplies. 

The objective of their group would be to create their very own Homecoming Parade coded route on the white paper for their Ozobot to travel through.  They could create it anyway they wanted, taking into account the basics of coding with the Ozobot.  
The tips sheet on drawing lines and the....
...two Color Codes sheets from Ozobot would help them as they worked together to create their route successfully. 
You will find these Color Codes sheets here.  
And to make it even more fun and unique, they could decorate their robot to make it look like a homecoming float, Van Meter bulldogs or anything their team came up.  We should them lots of ideas online too. 
The teachers, Amy Garrison, Ann Volk and Amanda Wright, got them into groups of 3 or 4. They split the groups equally between their three classrooms where they would work. 
We passed out the materials and had a craft station in each of the three rooms...
...for them to choose the supplies...
... they needed for their homecoming parade. 
With the Ozobot's being so handy to charge on these cool little charging stations, it was super easy to give them each a full charged robot and tell them they could plug in if needed throughout the morning too. 

Next, they set off to work! 
Each group did such a wonderful job of working together from the start.  
They did some practice and figured out...

...what worked for them as their parade route was created first with pencil, and then....
...with marker. 


We watched them figure things out when they didn't go so hot the first time too.  This was amazing to watch.  

One of the things I loved about working this way on the project, was that everyone in the group had a job.  Some of the students took over the drawing of the route, while others wanted to decorate the paper around it. 

And lots of them, especially are little crafty thinkers, 
took the role of turning their Ozobot into a float or character. 
No matter what role they had, they all worked together to create an amazing project. Take a look at the work that took place...
 
When all of their work was complete and the robots floats were ready to go, we had the first ever, 
Ozobot Homecoming Parade at Van Meter! 
Each big group took turns rotating through each class to see all of the fantastic creations. 
They loved seeing how each one was different and....
took pride in the work they had done, the parade route they coded for their robot and the costume they gave their Ozobot.
This is the first stop for Ozobot at our school. 

For our 3rd graders, the next stop will be learning how to code our Ozobots using the OzoBlockly program.  You can check this program out here

So, check back in with us soon.  We can't wait to see where Ozobot will take us this year! 

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