Bee-bots

During my GPP, I did not use bee-bots as I felt that they were too childish for my year 5 class. For my final placement, I will be teaching year 1 and I am looking forward to use this opportunity to incorporate bee-bots into my lessons.

BareFoot Computing has a lesson plan for an introduction to programming using bee-bots that I might try to incorporate in my maths lessons.

The lesson feeds into computing and maths in the following ways:

computing

- algorithms - understand how programs execute by following precise and unambiguous instructions

maths

- geometry: describe position and direction 

- fractions: understand whole, half, quarter and three-quarter turns 

The lesson: 

Pupils create sequences of instructions to enable the Bee-Bot to navigate a route tracing out the shape of numeral e.g. 3.

 The children can also try to record their instructions using simple drawings of the commands before executing the commands.  

The task is more difficult than it sounds and the initial algorithm that the students come up with may not do anything close to what they'd like the bee-bot to do.

For example, for the numeral 2, children may start with the following: 

This gives an opportunity to talk about turns (half turns). Scaffolding should eventually help students understand that an appropriate algorithm would look like this:

The activity will allow students to learn about programming, debugging and algorithms.