Robots

I've started doing work with Robotics in my Coding Club. Read about our work here. As part of my preparation ahead of creating JunkBots next week (because I seriously knew NOTHING about robotics before starting this term) I took a few bits and pieces home to start practising. Thanks to Jaycar and a local hobby shop (shout out to Rory's RC Hobby House), and the wonderfully generous support of our school's P&F, I equipped myself with some basic click-together kits, some battery cradles, a few small motors, some AAs, wires, servos, propellers and a whole lot of crossed fingers. I got home and spread the lot out on the kitchen table to see how the heck it all went together.

My son has been coming to Coding Club. He doesn't mind sitting in with all the "big kids" and he does his little, 6 year old version of what they're working on - whether it be Scratch, Blockly games, or robotics. So he was quick to jump in and give me a hand.

It was funny to watch him with his father at home. His dad (coincidentally a primary school teacher) grabbed the instructions and started painstakingly reading through them and getting frustrated that my son didn't want to wait. My son, on the other hand, started grabbing bits and clicking them together. He developed an excellent method of trial-and-error, discarding pieces as they didn't work, trying different batteries, switching poles, changing wires, until he got a tiny lightbulb to glow. He then explained to anyone who would listen why the lightbulb was glowing now when it wouldn't before.

My 4 year old daughter didn't want to be left out. She jumped up, grabbed a motor, a battery, and a propeller and asked me what they did. I helped her put it together and explained how the circuits worked. Straight away, she grasped that she had to put the same coloured wires together and hold the "metal bits" together so the circuit was complete, otherwise the propeller wouldn't work. She too started experimenting to see what would happen when she physically stopped the propeller, or disconnected a wire, or moved the battery.

It was wonderful to see their passion for teaching themselves. After a fairly stressful Coding Club where I just COULD NOT get the kids to listen, it made me stop and think. I realized that I need to just let them run. I don't need to teach them everything, I just need to be there to answer questions, and ASK questions, and get the kids to learn for themselves. It's what I tell the teachers I work with all the time. It was an epiphany to learn that I needed the same advice myself. I will be applying that approach to next week's session.