Ollies and Programming

Through the generosity of Chevron's Fuel Your School Program, I received six Sphero Ollies last fall. Over the school year my students and I have experimented with different apps to learn programming using the Ollies. The students were motivated to learning coding while using the Ollies. There is of course a level of frustration that comes with learning something new. Most of my fourth grade students were able to program the Ollies using the Tickle app on the iPads. There was a lot of moving forward at full speed and crashing into walls before they got the hang of it. I introduced the Ollies to the summer program students. I started with the older students. I discovered that some of them did not have enough experience with basic block coding. This made programming the Ollies very difficult for them. The easy solution was for them to work on Code.org to gain the coding experience they needed.

The challenge came when the younger students really wanted an opportunity to use the Ollies. Mindshift gave me an idea for an app. The article was about high school English students using Ollies to make connections to literature. The article mentioned the Sphero Draw n Drive app. This app was the perfect solution for providing access to programming the Ollies for the younger students.

Even the block coding was too challenging especially for the pre-readers. Thankfully an article I read on

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Ollies and Math

Thanks to generosity of Chevron through Donors Choose , my math class experienced a new mobile technology, Ollies! Ollies are programmable robots made by Sphero . We used the app, Macrolab to program the Ollies. I modified a lesson from the Sphero website to teach the concepts of measurement and data. The first day, we explored how to program the Ollies and how changing the variables in the program affected what Ollie did. The students recorded data to capture what they were seeing. On day 2 it was time to be more methodical with our data collection. Students only changed one variable at a time. This allowed students to discover the relationship between time and the distance that the Ollie traveled. The students changed the variable of the delay between the roll and stop commands to develop this understanding. There was definitely a lot of excitement and motivation to learn measurement. On Day 3, we analyzed the data recorded from each group. There were some noticeable differences

Roller Coasters

The students chose words to describe roller coasters. We recorded them using Answer Garden . I think it also describes what building roller coasters is like. There was a buzz of excitement as groups of students designed and constructed marble roller coasters. One of the student remarked, "This doesn't look like regular library time." He had just asked me if he could tape the roller coaster ramp to the wall and was shocked when I said, "Of course." The students were so engaged with their projects that they did not notice a visitor from the Hillsboro Tribune . Kathy Fuller came to learn about what was happening in our building this summer. We are proud that we will be featured in the newspaper. I will make sure to include the link in a future post. We will be continuing our roller coaster construction tomorrow. I am very thankful that our custodial staff is supportive of these messy projects. This video captures the feelings expressed in the wordl

Halfway

I am taking it as a positive sign that we are halfway through our summer program and there is still tons of positive energy. Mrs. Gonzalez and Ms. Ayala's phone calls resulted in 5 new students today! We are expecting even more new students on Monday. My hope is that we can bring the average daily attendance to 40 students. This article affirmed our purpose for the summer program and pushing the students to work on their math skills in addition to reading. http://www.vox.com/2014/7/13/5891583/summer-slide-achievement-gap-vacation I am looking forward to comparing their end of the year MobyMax math placement with their beginning of the year placement test score. Plans for next week... Model canoes, gardening, writing a Scratch character description and an art project

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