Last year we decided to add Robotics to our Middle School Technology offerings. I was given the freedom to choose the tool for this class. As we have taught Scratch here for the past seven years I was hoping to find something that would allow us to make “robots” but also allow the students to use their Scratch programming skills. After some research I settled on the Hummingbird Robotics kit. A decision I ended up being very happy about.
The one thing I liked the most was the diversity of the creations made by our students. They created animals, games, superheroes, helicopters, apartment buildings, movie characters, cars and more.
The videos below will show you some of what we accomplished.
We used a variety of materials some bought others brought from home.
Cardboard
Popsicle Sticks
Straws
Fabric
Boxes
Toothpaste Boxes
Hummingbird Kit Boxes
Tape
Glue a lot of Glue!
and More.
Our goal was to use a design cycle to guide us through brainstorming, sketching, prototype creation, prototype evaluation and finally the building a robot.
Assessment is through a class iBook journal containing photos, videos and reflections.
I have been slowly moving the resources I find at hummingbirdkit.com and some of my own to a class iBook so all material is one location. I have added chapter six (robotics) to a dropbox folder so if you want download it here is a link. It is, very much, a work in progress so there will be frequent updates and some mistakes!(dropbox link-Chapter Six Sample.ibooks)