Today, Delaunay used their computing lesson to build on what they have learnt about programming in previous years.
This year’s Year One students have just had an early introduction to programming using the school’s Bee-Bots, so we invited these experts into our class to tell us all about it. Here is the recent Year One blog from Kapoor class: https://lansburylawrence.towerhamlets.sch.uk/kapoor-learn-how-to-program-beebot-robots/
These young experts helped us refresh our memories and got the children in Delaunay talking about what they remembered learning about programming from their time in Year One last year . . . . . then we were ready to go!
In our project today, we extended our prior learning by planning commands in different orders to create algorithms and investigate how the order affects the outcome. Creating more complex programs to help the Bee-Bot avoid obstacles, testing, evaluating and fixing errors in their designs were important steps along the way for the children.
This unit has developed the children’s understanding of instructions and how to apply them in particular sequences to achieve an objective. The unit has also challenged the learners to use logical reasoning to predict outcomes.
Ezan: “Today we gave robots a list of instructions called an algorithm. One of our keywords was instructions, and I learnt that computers use instructions to do things. You can even test instructions to see if they work or not.”
Rodala: “In our computing lesson, we used algorithms to program robots called Bee-Bots. The robots could not choose what to do, and they had to follow the instructions we gave it. You have to give clear instructions if you want your programming to be successful.”