I am lucky enough to have 2 Sphero SPRK robots in my classroom.  Recently, we got them out to participate in the Hour of Code.  My students had two opportunities to try Sphero out and test their coding skills. Using the robots is fun enough on its own, but I decided to step it up a little bit and add in some extra details! We also practiced retelling one of our favorite stories with a bit of a coding twist!

What you’ll need:

• Colorful Masking Tape Set
• Colorful Traffic Cones
• Small Bowling Set

The first thing we did was create a grid on one of our classroom rugs with Colorful Masking Tape.  We were working on retelling stories and so I challenged my students to use paper arrows to help get the Gingerbread Man through the grid and to stay away from the fox! I placed the characters from the story into different boxes on the grid and then let my students work their way through as they placed the arrows.  They then took the Gingerbread Man and tested out their path to determine if it worked or not.  We used Sphero (posing as the Gingerbread Man) later to follow the path and I forgot to get a picture of that!! 😦  The best thing about this grid is that its still stuck on our rug! My students begged that I leave it on the rug so they could use it again and even with all of us walking on it each day, its still there!

Next, we used some more Colorful Masking Tape to create a bowling alley! I taped off a section of the floor with red tape and then added in some white tape to show where the pins should go (and to create an “x” for my students to stand on).  My students set up the pins from the Small Bowling set on the white lines and started bowling! They loved trying to see how many pins they could knock down.  We played just like real bowling, they got two chances to knock down the pins, but we did not keep score.  Eventually, we will add the number of pins knocked down in each turn together as we work on adding to ten, but for now, we are just exploring!  We also left our bowling alley taped to the floor and we cover it with the rug (from above) when we are not using it.  So far, the Colorful Masking Tape has not left any residue on the carpet, so our housekeepers will be happy!

Finally, to make things a little more challenging, I set up an obstacle course with Colorful Traffic Cones for my students to maneuver the Sphero through.  To begin, we set up a simple in and out weaving pattern.  Later, we added in a turn to the in and out pattern and that made it a little more difficult, so we will be practicing that for a little longer!

These ideas could be used with any robot that you might have or if you don’t have any “bots”, you can always have your students “program” each other through the challenges!