Mrs O’Connor has been doing some brilliant work with the Junior Primary students in integrating early computational thinking with other curriculum areas. This week she introduced the Prep students to the idea of using the language of location and direction whilst getting them to physically connect to the concepts. She used a child sized grid to position the children, used language to place a target shape amongst them and then got the watching children to direct a child-bot (I watched “HarryBot”) to the target. The child bot was actually programmed on this head in the same way we program BeeBots, for example, “Forward, forward, forward turn right, forward”.
After a series of activities using this grid, the children then got to use the Bee-Bots and there were many squeals of excitement and delight as they predicted the number of ‘forwards’ it would take to travel to their partner to have it proven right or shown to be something they needed to modify.
ACARA outcomes:
Mathematics
Describe position and movement
Elaborations
- interpreting the everyday language of location and direction, such as ‘between’, ‘near’, ‘next to’, ‘forward’, ‘toward’
- following and giving simple directions to guide a friend around an obstacle path and vice versa
Foundation to Year 2 / Digital Technologies Knowledge and Understanding / ACTDIK001
Recognise and explore digital systems (hardware and software components) for a purpose
Digital Technologies Processes and Production Skills
Follow, describe and represent a sequence of steps and decisions (algorithms) needed to solve simple problems(ACTDIP004)