Link to the first draft of the presentation http://bit.ly/nashobahoc or here
We will continue to explore resources and connect with students over the next few weeks and add to the presentation and social media #HourofCode - draft schedule HERE
Additionally, I am working on a presentation http://bit.ly/hocmarotta to capture so of the items I will cover with students and classes.
Stay tuned for Hour of Code during December!
Learning about Coding with https://rootrobotics.com
"Root looks a bit like a Lilliputian, six-sided cousin of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. But it can do a lot more than just suck up dust. When you stick a whiteboard marker into a hole in the center of Root, it can draw lines. (It comes with a whiteboard surface you can put on a table, but thanks to a set of internal magnets it can also work on vertical whiteboards that have metal backs.) It can light up, play music, sense when you touch its surface, when it hits a barrier, when the environment is light or dark, when it hears a noise, or even when it rolls over a particular color.
Get Talking Points in your inbox: An afternoon recap of the day’s most important business news, delivered weekdays. Enter email address Sign Up All those features enable Root to make not just drawings — one of our first projects was a snowman, with a few notes from the “Frozen” song about snowman-building played at the end — but also to respond to things happening around it, and to play games. And what makes it likely to endure as an educational toy in your home is that Root supports three levels of coding in its companion app (available only for Apple’s iOS devices at present). The first level is entirely graphical, with icons that show the robot turning or playing a musical note or seeing light. The second level, which my 10-year-old likes to use, gets into computing operations like if-then and repeat, but there’s a library of action elements to choose from. The third level is completely text-based — real coding in languages like JavaScript and Python. To help kids progress from one level to the next, the company offers a set of lessons called Root Academy for $5 per month, but it’s not essential to getting a lot out of the bot. Trial and error is a big part of learning how to code, and it’s fun to debug things when Root takes a wrong turn or draws something you didn’t intend.
I tested out the Root Robot with some inspiration from @codewithroot and the snowman activity I found on twitter. I needed to download the Root Coding ios app charge the device and start to explore.
After getting some basic controls and understanding the levels of the robot I found lots of interesting examples online and tested out the snowman on the mat provided with the robot. I the tried on a large sheet of paper and then the whiteboard. Unfortunatley the whiteboard snowman was not a clear and the mat example. once I tweeted out my example @codewithroot let me know they were working on a firmware update and provided me the link to the globe article. I love the fact this local company from Cambridge has developed a way to engage students in coding at all grade levels.
See the video example below: More videos here Learn more at https://rootrobotics.com
I plan to explore with a few classes over the next month.
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