This week, the first week back from winter break, has been an incredible experience with STEAM and robotics. On Tuesday, January 5th, I had the pleasure of partnering with Kristi Van, a third grade teacher at Fairmeadow Elementary School as her students had a free exploration of Spheros. The students had a wonderful time with the Spheros and they quickly caught onto the user interface of the iPad app to control their Spheros. Blog post about this experience.
The fun with the Spheros continued it the afternoon with Valerie Sabbag's fifth grade class. I had the chance to touch base with Valerie during lunch about her plans for her students with the Spheros. She told me they've explored maneuvering the Spheros the day before and she developed a few courses for her students to take their Spheros on. These 4 to 5 courses became the students' "Driver's Ed" class as well. An example of one of the courses was to drive the Sphero down a straight line of blue tape, stop on an "x," and then drive it back to where it started. Another course involved maneuvering the Sphero around the classroom and under stools without hitting the legs of the stools (if you did, you had to start over). One other course was to circle around the three round picnic tables outside the classroom without bumping into the legs.
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Valerie told me her students will continue to work on maneuvering the Spheros after lunch along those courses and if they're successful, they will receive their driver's license. I know how special that would be because I remember as a kid, I was always so excited to get my driver's license for Malibu Grand Prix in Redwood City, a mini golf and cart racing location that recently closed down, and Disneyland's Autopia. I immediately asked if I may help whip up the driver's license once I found out they weren't ready yet. Below is a picture of what we eventually issued to the students after they were able to successfully pass the "Sphero Driver's Ed" class.
Here's the template of the driver's license if you'd like to create your own. It's a Pages file. Email me if you need it in a different format. |
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Word Cloud of student responses to using the Spheros.
Click "Read More" to view one last video of fifth grade students in Valerie Sabbag's class explore making their Sphero jump, dance, ... in the tub of water.