Story so far for aged 5 to 7

Educational robots are designed with a purpose, which is to lead kids to discover coding and robotics. (I do agree with their research claims). The robotics club has been really rewarding. The club seems to be more popular with the aged 5 to 7 group. I designed activities to use the robots as efficiently as possible and set milestones. So each session, the parents can see in real time the child discovering new aspects of themselves. By leading the parents and the child through a series of activities with the educational robot. The following can be observed.

• Concentration time increased from 5 minutes to 15 to 20 minutes because of interests and wanting to try more.
• Picture abstraction to action – understand how pictures represent commands to the robot and the robot’s actions.
• Counting and problem solving – how to solve simple problems.
• 3rd person (robot view) enable the child to orientate themselves depending on which direction the robot is facing.
• Sequential processing is the addition of individual actions to achieve an overall desired result through trial and error.
• Programming a longer list of codes (screen-free) and ability to evaluate line by line to debug and optimise the order of operation.
• Loop to explore infinite loops to start program behaviours.
• Conditional functions to apply “if” functions to set actions and behaviours.
• Relatable scenarios to program a robot to perform everyday behaviour. So a child can programme behaviour to a robot.

The family time spent discovering something is enjoyable. My objective is to let the child discover and reach the scenario with minimal supervision as per principles of unsupervised learning. I estimated about 10 sessions required to enable a child to programme behaviour to a robot. which is totally about 7 hours (45 min sessions) . BE a Scholar Tuition approach emphasizes efficiency because everyone has limited education resources.

Story so far for aged 8 to 13

The 10 sessions are made up of 8 robot build sessions and 2 programming sessions to make sure the child can program the robot that they built. Aged 8 to 13 are open to more activities. The education robot kit here covers teamwork, mechanical builds, robotics, and programming. I added the Scientific Method as an academic element to the session, which may have made it “less” fun (I disagree). Early feedback suggests that kids just want to build stuff. The 8 build sessions and 2 programming sessions covers the following topics:-

• Engineering processes – teamwork
• Introduction to energy
• Systems Engineering, Logical decomposition
• Programming
• Bio-inspired robotics
• Gears
• Degrees of freedom
• Frequency
• Linkage and geometry.

Programming a behaviour for a robot realises the full potential of the VEX 1-2-3 robot for ages 5 to 7. For the aged 8 onwards, the full potential is the ability to use VEX GO kit to build a custom design robot, with consideration in the mentioned topics.