It may have been the last day of school before winter break, but the second graders in Jane Sullivan’s classroom at the Glover School were laser focused and excited.
They were using new learning mats and programming Bee-Bot mini-robots to take on challenges like spelling out words and visiting places on a map.
The 32 new mats, about 3 feet long by 2 feet tall, were purchased with a grant from the nonprofit Friends of Marblehead Public Schools.
Last year, FMPS funded 40 Bee-Bot robots.
“The goal is for kids to learn the basics of coding,” Sullivan said. “They’re learning how to plan before doing, work collaboratively and troubleshoot when things go wrong.”
The challenge for Sullivan’s second graders on this day was to work in small groups to build a program that would move the Bee-Bot from letter to letter on one mat to spell out words, including “use” and “sure.”
Another challenge was to program a Bee-Bot to travel on a town map from the library to the bank and then the toy store.
First, the kids used pencils and paper to plan out their code. Then they programmed their Bee-Bots. Finally, they placed their Bee-Bots on the mats and pushed “go.”
“They’re like robots,” explained one girl. “And you can program them to do what you want.”
She and her partner coded their Bee-Bot to spell out the word “talk.”
The first try didn’t quite work, so the girls went back to their desk to work out the kinks, first on paper and then with their Bee-Bot.
When they were successful the second time, one girl said, “This feels really awesome.” Her partner did a little floss dance.
A team of boys also had a little troubleshooting after their first coding attempt didn’t quite hit the mark. They weren’t put off by the setback. They went back to their desks for some debugging and soon had the Bee-Bot running the code perfectly.
