Robotics started at both school last weekend.  They’ll run for 9 weeks on Saturdays till mid-December.  Unlike my other classes, I am supported by a group of great volunteers from New York Cares and a teacher from the school.  This allows us to work with a larger group of kids with smaller internal groups.

We tried this out last year at one school with older Lego RCX and a group of fifteen 4th graders.  The kits were good, but programming was difficult.  We did some fun atypical robotic projects (dancing flowers, baseball robots) and the school deemed it enough of a success to order new Lego Mindstorm NXT kits.  I also talked the other school I work at into starting a similar program so that the kids from the two schools could meet and hold their own local competitions or fairs.

Most of the volunteers from last years robotics and video game program returned this year for the new robotics class.  The classes are staggered so that I can run the first hour at one school then hustle over to the other school and run both hours.  One of the volunteers from last year is kindly running the second hour at the first school.

Back to back classes made it easy to compare between the two schools.  Kids responded differently and took the lessons down different paths, but they both ended about the same.  One school is definitely rowdy than the other, but maybe the kids are just tired at the other school (it starts 90 minutes earlier).  At one school I had to use a smart board because they didn’t have a regular white board; at the other school I used a paper easel because they didn’t have good white board.

I try to conceptualize how the lesson will go before starting, but I don’t usually write things down in advance.  It’s probably not the best use of time, but we get everything done in the end.  Or maybe we don’t, but we get done what we want done and the kids feel like the learned or accomplished something new.  Last year in the Saturday robotics class, I gave vague projects for the kids to mold into their own.  One student turned the dancing flower into an dancing flower with an elaborate security system.  Video game design and robotics are perfect for these kinds of open projects to let the kids explore their own thoughts, like creative writing or art backed by science and math.  Perhaps I’m offloading my own planning problems onto the kids, in which case they handle the situation gracefully.

I do make worksheets from time to time.  I have a handful of full page worksheets I crafted for electrical components and cryptography theory.  I’ll post those when I come back to them in the breakfast classes.