Focus on Life: Week 13 ~ At eye level

Sally Russick of The Studio Sublime is hosting another year long challenge which is... sublime... as you'd expect with such a studio name. The challenge is named 'Focusing on Life' and for 2014 Sally is choosing a monthly theme, with a different prompt each week.

The theme for March is 'Checked Out' and this week's theme is At eye level.

I'll have to explain what met my eyes this morning. 

A few months back the school agreed to create a Lego Robo team with William and a few of his friends (3 boys and one girl for a team of 4). We received 2 Lego robotics kits from the board and proceeded to work. 

They built the robots, and I taught them to program it. First on the robot brick itself, very simple instructions (5 instructions only). Then on the computer - at the Pilot level, with simple steps and things like 'Go forward', 'Go backward', 'Turn a light on / off'. Then yesterday I introduced them to the Inventor level, which itself has 4 levels. I got them through Levels 1-3, with the possibility to add instructions for each motor, each sensor (it has light, sound, push sensors - and you can add more, like temperature), play music, as well as use loops, jumps, and forks (tasks running in parallel). 

Last night I worked on something (I need to understand how the robot works before I can teach the kids :) ) and I thought to put everything aside when I retired for bed. Then I thought 'hmm, let it stay here, on the table and see what happens in the morning' 

What you see above happened in the morning: I woke up and the child was in front of the laptop, creating that quite complex structure, and testing it. It almost worked as he imagined it from the first time (couple of tweaks only were needed). 

Needles to say I am incredibly proud of him - of all 4 of them, in fact, they all grasped quite complex concepts very easily. Two of them work at empirical level (trial and error), while two actually study and check before testing. It's interesting to watch them, and it's incredibly rewarding to see their robot do what they wanted it to do. 

Wish us luck next Thursday! They dream of winning all they way to Nationals and going to Brazil (where the World competition takes place this year). 

In the meantime, they settled for ice cream: if they win, it's celebratory ice cream; if they loose, it's 'cheer-up!' ice cream. You must love their logic!

In the meantime, please see what everybody saw at their eye level - it's going to be an interesting get-together :)