Hanno
11-17-2011, 06:20 AM
Today I took some TBots to a local school in an area that was particularly badly hit in this year's earthquake. I started by showing them the components that make up a robot and then showed how to program the robots to play music, flash the red/gree/blue light with their favorite colors all while moving around. In the next 20 minutes the group of 10 to 14 year olds explored all sorts of concepts with 12Blocks including: reacting to sounds, loops, variables and text to speech.
The kids had some experience with the MIT's “Scratch” language and were therefore able to quickly get going. They were very excited to do “real world learning”.
One of the kids was a 10 year old girl who was particularly affected by the quake and hadn't smiled since Februrary. Her teacher told me afterwards that it had been his mission all year to make her smile and finally today she did - learning with the TBot. The story ends on an even better note, the school is now developing a robotics program around their new TBot and 12Blocks.
Hanno
The kids had some experience with the MIT's “Scratch” language and were therefore able to quickly get going. They were very excited to do “real world learning”.
One of the kids was a 10 year old girl who was particularly affected by the quake and hadn't smiled since Februrary. Her teacher told me afterwards that it had been his mission all year to make her smile and finally today she did - learning with the TBot. The story ends on an even better note, the school is now developing a robotics program around their new TBot and 12Blocks.
Hanno