IT tools

Robotics Workshop

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The third day of the project ‘Let’s think about our future working life’ was devoted to improving the knowledge about IT tools they could use.

Latvian students had prepared different workshops and classes in international groups to teach the rest of European students – Spanish, Romanian and Estonian students, different IT tools.

There were IT workshops at school, students were able to operate and learn new skills in programming robots and then demonstrating them in action.

The resourses for IT Workshops on Programming day and 'Code Week' activities were taken from sites:

https://education.lego.com/enus/downloads/mindstorms-ev3/software
https://codeweek.eu

Code week

The first part of the day was devoted to Code Week activities.

EU Programming Week is a citizens' initiative that aims to introduce everyone to programming and digital literacy in an interesting and engaging way.

Learning to code helps us make sense of the rapidly changing world around us in order to explore new ideas and innovate for the future.

Learning to code is one of the most important skills for building and programming robots as well; before building the robot, practicing basic coding skills are required.

Coding is the fastest way to make our ideas come true and the most effective way to develop computational thinking capabilities. However, technology is not strictly required to develop computational thinking. Rather, our computational thinking skills are essential to make technology work.

Coding without digital technology- unplugged coding activities were practiced without any electronic device.

The main purpose of unplugged activities is to lower the access barriers to bring coding in every school, regardless of funding and equipment.

Unplugged coding activities unveil the computational aspects of the physical world around us, and it was well demonstrated by the project participants. In this type of activity one student was a ‘robot’ and the other one is the programmer; the programmer had to program ‘the robot’ to move using different signs.

The next level of coding was learned by constructing the robot and giving it commands to move in the second IT workshop - ‘Robotics Workshop’; robotics is strongly connected to IT or computer science.

Coding is a foundational element of robotics, and students need to know how to use variables, create conditional statements, use functions, and other basic coding skills.

Coding is essentially written instructions that a robot or computer program can read and then carry out. Students had to determine the task they wanted to complete through a robot, design the code to make it happen, and then send it to the robot to view the outcome, and good advisors were Latvian students.