Robotics Composition Tutorial

For this resource chapter, it is time to learn a robot composition editor in some greater depth and consider ways to integrate its knowledge into professional practice. This involves learning many features of the program and using this knowledge to create two products, one that involves your solo effort and one that requires some team discussion with members of your assigned media team. You will be becoming one of the class experts on robotics composition. The thought that with a couple of weeks study you can be the class, building and school district expert on anything may seem strange to you. Yes, there will always be experts who know much more than you. Always. But in the rapidly exploding amount of knowledge in the 21st century, there will be many levels of expertise and your many hours study put you far ahead of others. This is the new normal for the ideas in the essay on the Age of Knowledge. It is these skills with learning itself that 21st century schools must teach.

Learning a Robot Editor

Continue to study and work through the Robot Educator clips within the NXT 2.1 software, completing tutorials we have not covered in the course. But what does it mean to study a tutorial activity? To study an activity means to watch the simulation, build and program, to try out those features, then replay any portions that did not work for you in your practice, and finally take some notes on where this skill might be taught in the grade level sequence.

Media Team Project

With the members of your team, create a folder containing a Word document in which you plan and sequence a thematic series of educational activities that incorporate each of the digital palette elements that your team members are studying into the content areas of your team members. This is the kind of pre-planning that becomes the basis for later lesson plans (which are not part of this assignment). In this document indicate the contribution that each team member has made. Also, add to the folder a file or files of your own contribution that demonstrate your mastery of what you have learned about your media and be clear in the Word document about which files go with which part of the team's sequence of education activities.

Solo Project

Your goal here is to learn your media and to demonstrate and give evidence of your learning by the practice files you create. You will also need to create a folder of file or files that use this accumulation of knowledge to create media compositions that uses programming to teach an idea or concepts. It may be clear by the text annotation that you put in the robot programming just how the robotics design and programming will be used to help students learn, or you may need to add a Word or Powerpoint and explain further its instructional role.