Playing With Probots

We have been using TTS BeeBots with younger students in school for a while now, but have not until recently had an affordable floor turtle option that we could use with older children to support extension of floorwork and transition to the onscreen LOGO work we want to develop with them. Last Summer I invested in a class set of Probots also from TTS to help us bridge this gap, adding a new layer in the progression of learning in control and modelling with students at school.

The BeeBot has proven a popular and fantastic device to use with young students. I have posted a number of times about how we have used these in the classroom, to play sequencing games, develop prediction and conslidate spatial language. Staff who have used the BeeBot, have begun to find some very creative ways of including the "creatures" in their classroom activities to support learning and sequential thinking particularly across the curriculum, through self developed play mats, based around experiences using TTS's Focus on BeeBot software . The simplicity of the beebot as a device has helped open up and engage my colleagues with the teaching of Control and modelling in the early years and Key Stage 1. This has been supported by work on how with a little creativity and use of other tools this device can enable us to support learning and meet the current early control experiences our students need.

The Beebot's simple keypad enables forward, backward, right and left turns to be input as strings of commands, before using the go button to start the turtle out on the process of carrying out its programmed actions as a procedure. Turns to the left and right are input in multiples of 1/4 turn or 90 degrees. Developing learning within the control and modelling curriculum however is not just about the toole we use, but the pedagogy and thought process behind and which we bring to the activities, and how we use the resources available to contextualise and set problems.

Enter the Probot, here spotted at what I am told is the most picturesque view in the UK, Wastwater. Shaped like a car this device has a numerical key pad, enabling more complex sequences of commands, to be entered. Its programming language based on LOGO, enables commands to be input as strings as with the BeeBot, but in addition, through use of the onboard menu, procedures can be written and saved, for inclusion in more complex procedures. Rotations are input numerically as well as distances , so the vehicle is able to make turns other than right angles, and does not require repeated input of commands.

Here is a short video clip to show you what I mean.

In the Video I revisited a pattern sequence I created earlier using LOGO.

First of all the Probot was programmed to travel around/trace the perimeter of an imaginary hexagon by inputting

rpt 6[
fd 5
rt 60]

then pressing go

Then a pen was placed in the central pen holder, the placed Probot on a large piece of card and the go button pressed. This lead to the Probot tracing its route on the card and drawing the hexagon I had previously input.

Selecting from the menu to make a new procedure (proc 1), the sequence of commands to draw a hexagon were added, and the procedure saved

now entering
rpt 6[
proc 1
rt 60]

and pressing go
resulted in the probot drawing the hexagon 6 times, with a rotation of 6o degrees in between each hexagon.



The ability to store and run procedures, rather than inputting strings of commands, means that this turtle can be used to mimic on screen activities, and through the use of a usb cable onscreen activity and procedures can be downloaded from the software package Probotix , to the device, enabling onscreen activities to be transferred to the "floor turtle." I have to say that at the moment I am not having as much fun with this software as I thought I might, though this may be just due to my lack of familiarity with its quirks. I will get back to this later I hope, but currently it tends to lock up, when it doesn't recognise code, or when I make mistakes. Perhaps this will be different if I treat it more like the probot, and less like the LOGO environments I am familiar with. This however is a worrying aspect, especially if I want to use this software to support the floor to screen links I want to make.

Our Probots have Landed

YEY! Today after much of the waiting, with the baited breath, the anticipation, the pestering of the office staff and the arrival of the mail man, our Tesco Voucher order arrived, and with it...

the class set of Probots and our license for Probotix. Can't wait to see what the students make of these new tools.


Watch this space!

Wilbur Helps Out Again

Have uploaded another three Wilbur Helps Outs to our School Website. These include an introduction to 2 Create a Story, Getting started with Bee-Botology and Part 1 of a guide to using the tools in Think.com.

If you have not used Think.com, and have wondered what the environment looks like behind the scenes, or how some of the basic tools work, then this is a chance to see.

Bee-Bots Down Under

A group of Colleagues in Australia are exploring the use of BeeBots in the classroom, developing their own activities and floor mats and have developed this blogspace to enable them to share what they and their young students are learning in the process. Beebots have foraged in Ilford, Boogied in Bristol and much much more besides. Now check out what these industrious wee beasties are doing down under.

Thank you for sharing your blog with me, I look forward to visiting often and directing my friends and colleagues to read about the work you are doing.

Lightning McQueen: Control and Show and Tell

It is two terms now since I worked with the BeeBots and Year 2, and they are still excited about the work we did. I work with this group every Friday and one of the children excitedly came to me yesterday with a toy he had brought for show and tell. Lightning McQueen from the movie "Cars," made a guest appearence during our check in. I asked what had brought Lightning to class today and was told, how he was like our BeeBots only different, and how he thought I would like to meet him. Programmable toys are available in a multitude of varieties these days, but this toy particularly was nice as it's control inputs were readily identifiable by the child as being like those he had used in class. Making links is an important factor in the progression of any area of the curriculum, and I wanted to share this today, as it is the first example I have encounterd in my school of a student making links between a classroom based control activity and his real world experiences. It is a real step forward for me in terms of how far the children's ICT capabilities have progressed since the beginning of the year. As a class we spent some time discussing with him how the toy worked and having him demonstrate this, this was not only good for him, but also then enabled children to talk about toys they have at home that work in a similar way. It made me think of an earlier post, and how as part of an emergent aspect of the ICT curriculum I really want our students to see control as a meaningful and relevant aspect in their lives, and to begin identifying and evaluating control systems in the world around them. Using toys as a starting point might be just such a vehicle to begin enabling children look beyond the interface, and develop oral evaluation and visual disassembly tasks drawing on the personal experiences students have of control in the real world. Thanks J, not only did you make my day, but you were an inspiration.

Cross Curricular Control, BeeBot Games, Home Mades.i Board and Y1

There are a large number of ready made BeeBot Resources available from TTS, these include floormats, sequencing cards and a host of other accesories. We have purchased a number of these to support topic and theme based activity in class, and they go down really well with the students. The Focus on BeeBot Software is something I also recommend strongly, it not only enables on screen work to be developed from floor work with the students, but also has proven really useful, in beginning to enable colleagues to see the value of turtle work as a cross curricular tool. A 30 day trial download of the software can be made from the site above. Included in the package are a number of the floor mats as onscreen mazes, which we have used with the IWB during Numeracy and Literacy Sessions, to promote discussion about the properties of common shapes and to develop phonological awareness. What is also interesting is how the students react to being able to switch views to see the board as the BeeBot sees it. I have recently bought a site licence for this and am looking forward through coaching activities to further developing the use of this tool in Foundation and KS 1 classes.

In addition to the commercially available materials however I have also begun to introduce the idea of using resources we have available already to support BeeBot work in class. Did you know for example that BeeBots like to count. Creating Bus Stop type journeys (as in the Suffolk Empty Number Line Project) for the BeeBot, has enabled group activities to be developed around the use of number lines, and to begin seeing the forward movement of the turtle as addition and the backward movement as subtraction. The BeeBot and Number line have also been used to develop problem solving within the difference model and through for example, our Beebot is thinking of/ is on or at a number, if he counts on, adds, count's back, subtracts X he stops on Y, what number is he thinking of, or where is he? As seen in earlier posts it is also possible to make sequencing and theme based games quite easily, not only as a staff, but also with the students themselves taking an active role in the process.

Estimating, predicting and measuring using non standard units is also a useful mathematical role for the BeeBot, and with our year 1 students I used again the BeeBot Boogie mats we had developed for Y2, but this time to encourage turn taking, social play, prediction and testing within Ma 1. Ma 1 (Using and Applying Mathematics) is central to the New Primary Framework for Mathematics, and the ability to develop concrete visualisation and problem solving strategies, particularly in the context of shape space and measures can be supported through engagement of the students in practical activities supported by this versatile tool. Ideas such as right and left, linear measure, simple fractions, compass direction can all be introduced, or become inherent concepts within activities supported by beebot activity.

At the beginning of this term I used iBoard Purple activities to introduce our overall control unit in Y1, and to conclude we revisited and spent time working with the age specific tools in the iBoard red set, which require a focus on navigating mazes with greater accuracy, and introduce eighths of a turn. It was fascinating to see the students applying floor based work to their onscreen activity, and using taught strategies to think about and identify right and left turns. In other posts I have mentioned the use of gesture, as an indicator, and during these sessions I was really aware of this as evidence of learning, transferring physical whole and part body movements to thoughts about the inputs required to move the mouse, spaceship, bee, and frog about the screen. My Learning Support Assistant and had a great deal of fun engaging with the students with their games, and listening to the cheers, whoops and celebrations, (which attracted some attention from neighbouring classrooms too, OOPS!) Collecting fuel tanks, feeding the hungry frog before his food flew away, and the disappointment when he fell off the lily pads and into the pond were more than visibly evident around the room. If you have no idea what I am talking about, then I strongly recommend you check out the "Which Way, and "Control It" resources in the online trials of the software, which can be found following this link.

From Floor To Screen: Imaginary Journeys and LOGO

In a previous post I talked about using BeeBots with year 3s to develop floor compasses and promote discussion around the cardinal compass points. Since then we have used Roamers, borrowed from the Local CLC to explore and develop these compasses, introducing numerical values for the measurement of turn, and helping to establish and consolidate the language associated with rotation. We have introduced the idea of right angles, quarter, half, three quarter and full turns as multiples of these right angles, applied 90 degrees as a value of turn in a right angle, and introduced the idea that we can turn easterly and westerly, clockwise and anticlockwise as well as good old right and left. We have also introduced and consolidated the eight points of the compass and derived through our knowledge of halving and doubling, that the turns in between must be 45 degrees more or less than the compass directions we, or our turtle are currently facing. The hardware used for these floor based activities may be quite expensive to buy, but there is no doubt that the concrete and physical experiences they have provided, have made acces to the on screen turtle in LOGO smoother and less painful. They have also informed my intention to buy a class set of floor turtles. Currently my first choice for this is likely to be the Probot, from TTS.

Extending these experiences from floor to screen, the LOGO environment I have chosen to use in school is an open source tool called MSW LOGO . It has none of the bells and whistles of some of the commercially available packages, but with an uncluttered interface, it does exactly what it says on the tin, for this reason I think it is easy to use, with fewer distractions, and is more accesible than many of its counterparts. The turtle is a simple triangle, the apex it's head and the base it's tail. Transferring experiences from the BeeBot (as I didn't use or have access to Probots this time), forward is always towards the head end, back towards the tail. East and clockwise equate with right, and west and anticlockwise the left. A common problem children seem to find with the onscreen turtle is wanting to input up and down for forward and back, encouraging the children to visualise the BeeBot in it's place, helped them to understand what inputs needed to be given, and that head directional movements would be forward, while tail inputs would be back.

Why develop this unit? Well I felt we needed a unit of work for Year 3 which would bridge concrete floor work in key stage one, with the onscreen environment, and that this should incorporate an element of play and familiarisation. The suggested use of LOGO in Year four is quite heavy going, and a steep learning curve for the uninitiated. A nice feature, of MSW LOGO is the ability to import and use background images. Building on previous floor work where we had made treasure trails for the Roamer to follow, and written mystery tours, I decided to extend this on screen. I could have used Roamer World or a host of other similar tools, but was interested in the skills progression and familiarity students could build on later. Besides, with this software, making backgrounds for the turtle to move in is quite straightforward, and good fun too.

Opening MSW LOGO, you can export the workspace as a bitmap, or graphics file. I began by inputting a procedure to draw a very small square at the home position of the turtle, eg repeat 4 [fd 5 rt 90], then saved this as a background. This was then opened in Microsoft Paint, and the background created. The image at the top of the post is what I eventually produced. The icons and compass rose, were made from clipart, which was copied, pasted and resized before placing around the map. This was all done before the land and sea were floodfilled.

Using MSW Logo, the students used the bitmap menu to find and Load the map, and following the main teaching session were left to explore the island, inputting commands to travel to different locations. It was a fascinating to watch the interchanges as children made decisions about whether to turn right and left, by how much, and as they estimated and refined decisions about the distances the turtle would need to travel, adjusting inputs in response to on screen feedback. The physical gesturing and body movement of the students also reflected their thought processes, turning hands, and whole body movements seemed help with their predictive processes. For the remainder of these sessions we will be continuing to build on the outcomes of this session, by writing mystery tours for our friends, consolidating the ideas of the eight points of the compass, before in the the final session using storyboards to record the views on the island, we would see at various stopping off points planned for us by our friends.

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.

What A Beebot Wants... Designing games starting from children's own ideas.

Our Year 2s are amazing people! Anthropomorphism, is not only a WOW word, but has become one the key motivating factors in the way these yongsters have engaged their imaginations in working with their BeeBot Friends.

I wanted the children to think about ways in which we could introduce their new found friends and how they work to other children in school. I opened the session with what we had already learned about BeeBots, we now knew they loved to dance, but what else did Beebots like to do?

Using a Smart Notebook, in which we have been cummulatively documenting our work and ideas, not just as lesson activities and group games, but through photos and children's comments, we began a discussion and brainstorm of what BeeBots might like to do in their spare time. Using images of the children at work, and a few that came from Anthony Evan's Blog, we explored the idea of BeeBot Pastimes. Perhaps they might like to party, collect pollen, get dressed to go out, taste different foods, sleep in their beds go to school or visit friends are just a few of the suggestions that the children made. We extended this discussion to think about how the bots might go about doing these things. How would they get to their party? Where would they go to taste or eat their food? Where would they find their pollen? How would they get to school, and what might they pass on the way? What things would they have to do before they left their house for school?

Using some of these ideas as a stimulus, I suggested that all of their ideas seemed to involve collecting things, and perhaps what BeeBots might like most of all was to go on treasure hunts. From here I introduced the next challenge task, to design a game to play with younger students in the school using the BeeBots. I showed them a map I had made, where we could use BeeBot Procedures to visit fairytale characters, and asked for suggestions about how we might play the game. What would happen if we replaced the Characters with things we do when we get ready for school in the morning. Interestingly this game suggests ideas very like a task I have just done with year 6 children when working on flow charts. The children began to suggest ideas about how the Bot could travel around the grid or map, finding and putting on or collecting his clothes in the correct order. In essence, this game would involve the students in concretely inputting procedures, to carry out a real life process, what older children were currently doing more abstractly in Flowol.

The remainder of the session was spent making their game boards. Inputting single step procedures and making BeeBot footprints by drawing around their "friends" where they stopped. These "footprints, " will act next week as the grid, which they will decorate to form the context for their game and next time they will also make moveable cards which can be placed about the mat to design and redisign routes for the BeeBots to follow. I am very excited about this, as not only has the activity stimulated the children, with the motivation of sharing these with others, but has also highlighted some of the possibilities for using BeeBots with colleagues. There are a wide variety of commercially available BeeBot mats, but somehow the idea of children playing and sharing games that they themselves have made adds that extra dimension. I can't wait to see where their imagination takes them, and how they develop their ideas to realisable game designs to use with their friends. This task is evolving a purpose all of it's own which from which I am beginning to see a deeper understanding of input and output evolve than would have been possible through the use of commercial mats alone.

BeeBot Boogie Two

Since my last BeeBot posting our year two students have really got to grips with what these fun loving minbeasts can do. We developed our free play sessions, to begin thinking about units of measure. We had prepared ladybird shaped "dance mats" for each group to use, and began exploring what a BeeBot unit of measure might mean. We began by making predictions about, and then testing how many steps it would take for the bots to move across the mats we had made, at different points. At first the children guessed, but as the sessions moved on they began to refine these, until what they estimated was more realistic. We extended the activity further to invite predictions about where on the mat the BeeBot would stop, after certain inputs were entered, and finally we watched our video from last time, before engaging the students with their ultimate challenge. They must create a dance routine for their BeeBot, it must stay within the area of the mat. It was not allowed to touch the floor. Drawing on last weeks video, and the predictions we had made, the children soon realised that in order for this to happen, forward and backward inputs could not be greater than three, but "fancy" moves could be included in their routines, by adding on the spot turns, or using the pause button.

During the last two sessions we have also required the children to record their activity, and to note the inputs neccesary for their BeeBoot programs. With support the children have begun to plan their routines by breaking the actions down into steps, using the BeeBot to support this, clearing memory between each input, and recording the steps made. On completion of their boogie "routines," the children tested these, on the mat, in order to check that their boogie met the criteria we had shared for the challenge.

This week I brought along a collection of tunes created in Garageband on a Mac. These had been developed by students in year 3, during their control unit on playing with sounds, there were also one or two I had made myself while learning how to use the software. As Year 2 finalised and refined their routines, their groups were asked to choose the track they would like their Bot to Boogie to. To round off this section of activities, we came together, and shared our BeeBot Boogies, with our chosen backing track played behind it. Our LSA filmed the boogies, and today, I have compiled them with the children's chosen backing tracks. They are amazing in that they reflect the progress the children have made in such a short period of time, firstly in their problem solving, but also in their understanding of how we need to break down sequences of instructions into small steps, when planning, in order that what happens is what we expected. There were a few slip ups, but it is interesting how the students responded. Comments like "it didn't do that on our table," lead to discussions about whether or not the Bot had begun its boogie in the correct place on the mat. Even when errors were made the majority of bot bodies stayed within the confines of the mat area, which is also evidence of how the students engaged with the activity, and how their knowledge and understanding of control and measure have progressed in this context over the last couple of weeks. Videos of these latest offerings are available in the year 2 community pages of our school website. Hopefully you might enjoy them as much as we did creating them.

BeeBot Boogaloo

On Friday morning I was priviledged to work with our year 2 students. They are usually very excited by all things involving ICT, but even more so than usual today, as they met our beebots for the first time, and were completely drawn in to the context we had created for their use.

I was inspired by an idea presented in Anthony Evan's Blog, about the illegal capture, and sale of BeeBots from the wild. I used the idea as a starting point to, present these programmable toys as imaginary living things. Things to be cared for and looked after. Caring for resources and tools is one of my pet gripes, so introducing these new resources, and how we care for them, preserve their battery life, etc was a key element of the activities and routines I introduced to the students in this first session. The BeeBots loaned themselves beautifully to this. They were introduced in whispers in their carry cases as shy creatures, who were asleep at the moment. While they were asleep they were gently handled, as we talked about how we get them to do things. In a low voice I began explaining how we used the control panel to input instructions for forward and backward movement, how they were able to turn, and how we get the bots to go. The Bots were turned gently over, to show how we woke them up, and how we sent them back to sleep when we had finished our activities, by flicking the on off switch. The first part of the session focussed on the children playing freely with the bots, exploring what they could do and how they could make this happen. As you might imagine the first big problem was, having not modelled how to clear the bots memory, the instructions each group put in resulted in a growing number of actions by the bot each time the go button was pressed.

The children were brought back together and the idea of remembering, and memory was introduced. By pressing the clear memory button, we could get the bot to forget other actions and start again. The idea of the carry case, as a bed for the bots to sleep in between tasks as well as at the end of the session; the idea of clearing their memories, as a way of getting the Bots to forget what they had been doing in between activities, appealed very much to these young learners. The idea of puttng the bot to sleep, before putting them in their bed also contributed to the success of organising these sessions, with the children putting the bot to sleep before returning to the carpet space.

One of the problems within the activity was the excitement generated. This wasn't really a problem, it just required some management input to enable all children to have a turn. I rediscovered from lost memories today, that when we are 6 and excited, taking turns is not high on our priority list. So thinking quickly the children were encouraged to invent a "beebot boogy." I introduced the idea that what beebots like to do most in the world is dance, and that we could teach them how to do this, by inputting their "moves," for them. Each group were given a small white board and dry wipe pens, and encouraged to take turns to record a step in the "move." Every child could have 3 moves each. When they came to program the moves, the child who had written it, must be allowed to input it, it was only fair. Finally all moves had to be in before the bot could go. They had a really good time doing this, and the recordings or jottings they had made were photocopied later, as evidence for display too.

At the end of the session the children were allowed to keep their bots awake as we came back together to share our beebot boogies. I always carry with me either a DV camera or Digital Camera, and today I videoed the boogies. At home later I edited the clips together and added a sound track. The Beebot Boogies video for one of the year 2 classes can be found on our school website. Hope you enjoy the show.