Monday, December 12, 2016

Pro-Bot Challenges


Last school year, I had contributed the Pro-Bot Challenge Track lesson to the Tinker Studio website for the ICE Conference. This year, I was able to use the same lesson again with my new set of students; however, this time I wanted the challenge to continue beyond the initial lesson. Merely making the challenge track longer with more turns was not enough. With a little research, I was surprised to find a blogger that does just that: Move My Robot. Its many posts on drawing with the Pro-Bot include tutorials, challenges, and even the possible answers to the challenges. The challenges we took on were the Snowmen, A Dancing Robot, and Snails. For each, students were required to write out the code on paper before entering it into the Pro-Bot. I wanted them to consider the entire program and not just to add one step at a time and then try it out.