Students in 6th and 5th Grade at Economy have been busy building and programming Milo, a robot that can be built with the Lego WeDo 2.0 Robotics Kit. First, they built and coded Milo to move forward. Students worked in groups of 3 and each person had a specialized job, to keep things running smoothly. One person was the “Picker” or the person who found the correct Legos in the kit. Another person took on the role of “Builder”. The “Picker” handed the blocks to the “Builder” who assembled the blocks. Then the “Coder” programmed the robot on the iPad.
Next, students added a motion sensor and programmed the robot to stop at a flower and play tune. Then, they added a tilt sensor to their Milo and programmed the light on their robot to change color when the tilt sensor is moved back and forth. Last, was the Collaboration Challenge, where students had to get 2 Milos to work together to pull a load. Check out this video summary of our work below. We hope that the 4th Graders, as well as the students at State Street will be using these robotics kits before the end of the school year! Be sure to check out your student’s See Saw portfolio for photos and videos of their Milo in action!
Students in 4th Grade read stories from the book Times Tables the Fun Way that provides tales and visuals to help students remember their multiplication facts. For example, for 6 x 6 their are the two 6s that are wandering through the desert an and they are “thirsty sixes”. Thirsty six sounds like 36, so students will remember more easily that 6 x6 = 36. They recreated these stories by creating a program in Scratch, a free programming software from MIT. Here are links to their work:
Mrs. Malatesta’s Class
Mrs. Ray’s Class
Mrs. Rusnak’s Class
Mrs. Shumsky’s Class
4th Graders explored Potential and Kinetic Energy through the Hotwheels Speedometry curriculum. First, they explored making ramps. They started with a ramp that was one book high, and measured how far their car went. Then, they added 2, 3, and 4 books. They ran 3 trials each time and found the mean and created a bar graph of their results. Next, the explored using clamps to attach their ramp to a shelf to make their hill higher and subsequently increase the potential energy of their car. Students also explored different variables like the aerodynamics of the different models of cars and friction of surfaces. Here is a video summary of their work: