From the Foundation Classrooms

Tinkering with the Bee-bots  

During the last couple of weeks, the Foundation students have been revising their knowledge of location, exploring different spaces within their classrooms and around the school, and using language to describe the position of a variety of objects.

This week, the students were introduced to the Bee-Bots. Bee-bots are programmable floor robots that introduce some of the basic concepts of coding. Students were asked to apply their knowledge of directional language to program the Bee-Bots to follow a pathway of the students' creation.

Students were first given some time to 'tinker' with the Bee-bots, using the floor space in the classrooms to find out what the Bee Bots can do and to become familiar with how to program them. There was much excitement as the Bee Bots made their way around the classroom!

Students then worked in pairs and used classroom materials to build a simple obstacle course for their Bee Bots. They considered how they wanted their Bee Bots to move through the course and collaborated to make a class list of directional language, including terms such as 'forwards', 'backwards', 'between', 'around', 'towards', 'turn', 'right' and 'left'. Students were able to use this language to verbalise the path their Bee Bots took as they navigated around their obstacle course.