BOT d'abeille

Year 2 finished their BeeBot Games today, before wending their weary way off for a well earned half term break. Having missed the last session, due to a Briefing last week, I spent time this morning reviewing how the students had progressed without me. We carried out a group check in, where the children explained how far they had got with the process, shared the back story to their games and how the games they were making would be played. Some of the ideas they had developed were amazing, and I was surprised at how they had stuck to the task in my absence. A couple of the games had evolved to a recognition by the students that they might need to make shopping lists for the beebot, and one or two had begun to suggest that they might be improved by using dice. The session evolved into a 15 minute challenge to complete the games they had made, ready for a trial activity with their friends. I decided to carry this out through a "jigsawing" process. The children were brought together and divided into groups so that one person from each game making group was in each game playing group. The games were then played as a carousel, where the person from the game making group explained and demonstrated to the others how to play their game, giving the opprtunity for each game to be played, as the groups were rotated around the games. The children loved it, there were one or two problems with taking turns, but the social purpose of such activities with young children as we know, is to enable them to learn and practice these skills. Interventions today were not solely about ICT skills which the children had already aquired and were consolidating, it was more about sharng success, cooperating, and beginning to establish ideas about evaluation of the products outcomes, and the process elements of their projects. Being able to talk about our activities, and make decisions about how we might improve our use of ICT are key elements in the assessment process regarding children's engagement with ICT activity in the primary National Curriculum. This activity proved to be one way to begin engaging these young ICT users with this process.

In review, the children had enjoyed teaching their friend to follow paths, they liked the bit when they showed them how to dance, inventing a game to play with their friends had been good fun too. But they were also critical of their presentation, how sometimes the footprints they had drawn were not in the right place, or how they kept forgetting to clear the bots memory, before putting in new instructions, they could have made their game cards a bit bigger, and they needed to concentrate more to colour in and stay in the lines, and practice cutting out.

Both classes also asked today if they could have a beebot for their classroom and if they would be able to play their games with their friends and teacher in golden time this afternoon. This is great, as I have recently ordered a site licence for the BeeBot software which I hope they will enjoy using with their teachers next term. But now I also may have to find money from my new budget in April, to consider their request for a classroom pet of the programmable and motorised kind. This has special significance as they are now in competition with other colleagues and students who have been caught up in Beebot Fever. One example of this being a couple of Key Stage 2 colleagues, who borrowed Les BOT d'abeille (I hope this is an adequate translation) to suport small group consolidation of directional language use in french lessons this week. I hope the planned purchase of Pro Bots, for Key Stage Two, and a borrowed set of Roamers next term will spur us on to greater things within cross curricular control activity.