BOTS PD#2 Workshop: Teaching Coding

First and second grade teachers from Sheridan Street Elementary School, Murchison Street Elementary School, and St. Odilia School met with BOTS robotics trainers to do a professional development workshop that continued the progression through Code.org’s curriculum while introducing programming with Sphero Sprk+ robots. First, the Murchison Street teachers led a short training from Course C on Code.org to teach their colleagues the same lesson that was worked on in the previous PD. Then, the teachers transitioned to working on a new lesson from the Course C curriculum that focused on debugging. Rather than writing the code, the goal was to decipher pre-written code in order to fix the program. Debugging emphasizes students’ ability to problem solve, helping them overcome the inevitable feeling of frustration that comes from programming. For the last component of the workshop, teachers were introduced to coding with Sphero Sprk+ robots. Physical challenge courses were set up based on the online Angry Birds activity from the previous PD. The teachers were split up into groups, each tasked with writing a block program that would navigate their Sphero (angry bird) to the pig while avoiding the TNT tiles set up on the floor.

Resources

Agenda

LESSON PLANS: Course C Lesson 2 and Course C Lesson 3