My Thoughts on Robotics and Coding with Edison

Edison 2.0
via Edison

What are the 1-2 most important things you learned in this course?  How will these things be part of your future work as a teacher or librarian?

One important thing I learned in EDU772 is the role robotics will have in our future and how important it is for our students to be given an opportunity to work with robotics.  The Automation video was eye-opening, discussing how all jobs may one day be performed by a robot.  As teachers, it is our responsibility to expose our students to coding and robotics in order to prepare them for the future.  My district follows a strict curriculum, so in my ELA class it might be hard to expose my students to robots.  Some things I can do is provide them with articles that they can read on their own, or try to tie in robotics to my reading unit that talks about technology.

Another way I've exposed my students to coding and robotics, is by sharing my work in these classes with them.  I shared my homework assignments from EDU774 with them and they were intrigued.  I told them I was taking EDU772 and had to purchase a robot.  I was so excited to bring it in to class to show them, but unfortunately, we were quarantined.

I will continue to facilitate the WozEd coding club and plan on showing them Edison and the different programs he can run.  I also recently purchased something called a Juku Coding Kit.  I'm going to 'play' with it over the summer in hopes of sharing it with my students next year. 

 Juku Light Game Kit

via Juku Coding

What are 1-2 things you need to learn next to build upon what you learned in this course?  How will you learn these things?

To build on what I learned in this course, I would like to become more proficient in both Scratch and Python.  By becoming proficient in these two languages, I will be able to better teach my students in my coding club and maybe even expand my coding club to include these languages and robotics.  

To learn more about Scratch and Python, I will look for a websites, videos, and books.  The Scratch website tutorials and projects to review.  The Hour of Code website offers Professional Learning Programs.  There are also a lot of YouTube videos teaching different projects.  I really want to make that Raspberry Pi personal assistant!

via Raspberry Pi

I would also like to learn more about Raspberry Pi.  Because the price is so reasonable, it would a small investment to start a Raspberry PI club at school and I think the students would love to work with it.  I will need to explain why the school should make the small investment and I will need to be design a curriculum for the club.  Fortunately, the Raspberry Pi site offers free online training and a free two-day, face-to-face training program at the Picademy.  By participating in this training, you can become a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator.  This is definitely something to look into!