TRANSLATOR 5 TERMS

The activity that we have performed this week is about robotics. Trough it we have taught to the kids to program robots “Codey Rocky” and explained some concepts related with this topic:

-Event: Is the instruction that is given to the robot so it can start with the programmed activities. In the case of “Codey Rocky” there are several ways to start the programmed sequence of actions, such as simply starting it or pressing one of the buttons.

- Sequence: Set of actions ordered to carry out a task. An example of a sequence is the coding of the robot to act as follows lines or the coding so that when its color sensor detects the color red, it shows the word RED on the screen.

- Loop: The time or times that a sequence repeats. There are several options, forever, which means that the robot performs the action an undetermined number of times; repetition can be set a certain number of times ...

- Conditionals: Using conditionals, the robot performs an action depending on the circumstances. For example, in the line follower program, the robot had to move its right wheel if it detected the red color and move the left if it did not detect it, thus it was able to compensate the trajectory of its movement to follow the line, in this case red .

- Programming: It consists of giving a series of orders to the robot to perform a certain task. Each of these orders will correspond to a certain action, the set of these actions will allow the robot to perform a task.

QUESTION: (about the problems of the activity and that, find him a decent title, which I can't think of).

The activity that we have carried out this week as part of the activity "A day at my teacher's school" has been "Robotics", which in the face of a child audience, is very striking and entertaining, since in many cases It is the first time that they have had the opportunity to program a robot. However, in this case, due to the great time constraint, the children have not been able to use the robots as much as we would have liked, we had to stick strictly to what was programmed, which prevented us from giving the children enough freedom to use the robot on your own and thus fully enjoy the experience.

This is an activity that requires a lot of time, especially if it is intended that children reach the point of knowing how to program by themselves, since for this they first have to test the different functions of the same and reason how through them the different tasks. This in forty minutes (at best) is impossible, so the coding process had to be very guided, which made the activity a bit boring for the children.

We also believe that the approach of the activity is not the most interesting for children, since giving a series of commands to the robot and seeing how it follows a line can be heavy, since it does not imply such direct interaction of children with the robot. Perhaps it would have been more fun for them to directly drive the robot, and in the case of having more robots (the limitation of resources, another problem) to have made races or something like that.

Broadly speaking, these are the main defects that we have found in the activity and hopefully they will be taken into account for successive years, since the experience of "A day at my teacher's school" would improve greatly both for children and for future children. teachers.

Despite this, this has been a wonderful experience that we will never forget, since it was the first time that we have felt like teachers.