Course B, Unplugged lesson - My Robotic Friends

The ‘My Robotic Friends’ and ‘My Loopy Robotic Friends’ unplugged lessons are VERY difficult for 1st graders to understand. The commands they are supposed to use to program their robots are hard for them to grasp. The ‘step forward’ and ‘step backward’ which are actually half steps and the ‘turn cup right 90 degrees’ and ‘turn cup left 90 degrees’ are nearly impossible for them to grasp at that age. I ended up skipping the first unplugged robotics lesson and now I need to teach them the concept of repeat loops and the robotic lesson comes up again. Does anyone have another unplugged lesson I can use to teach repeat loops to First Graders?

If you’re finding that either of those lessons are too difficult for your classroom, feel free to pull similar lessons from Course A…in this case, Happy Maps and Happy Loops. The ideas are similar, but the turns are omitted.

I hope that helps.

~Happy coding!