I like the TREES video using robots to teach coding!

Great job on the video! Thanks so much for taking the time to create it!

Very many interesting aspects in this video. Would love to hear more about how this works in inclusive classrooms. What modifications have you made? How much PD do you need to provide teachers for them to feel secure running with the curriculum? Is this a replacement unit? Does it get integrated throughout the school year? Are your computational assessments available for others to view? Thanks again for a very interesting presentation!

Thanks for your video! Is the TREES program during the school day, or after school? If it’s during school, what class does it fit into?

Thanks for the great questions! On the project we have a couple consultants, one has expertise in autism, another has expertise in TESOL. They have reviewed our curriculum and made suggestions about how to make it more accessible. For the first round of implementation we ran three PD days over the summer with the 5th grade teachers and principal, which included going over the curriculum and getting everyone familiar with the robotics software. Also, as part of the PD, the consultants discussed strategies for making the curriculum accessible to all. This past year we tried integrating the curriculum throughout the school year, during the school day. It’s at the teachers discretion, many teachers did robotics in the fall (typically 1x per a week), then stopped for a while, and a couple are picking it back up now that testing is over. A big factor in being able to implement the curriculum during the school day has been a school culture that supports trying new things such as this project. To help everything go smoothly we try to have researchers in the classroom as much as possible, part of that involves trouble shooting technology issues, but I also think having researchers in the classroom is beneficial for answering curriculum related questions. We plan on revising the curriculum in light of what worked and where we see room for improvement.

Hi everyone,
Very interesting video. It sounds like you are going to have lots and lots of very interesting and useful data! I’ll look forward to reading some of your results in the coming years.

I was particularly interested to hear your comment about how you’ll use data on the way that students debug and so forth to support teachers in providing feedback to their students. As a curriculum developer myself (math, for the most part, but now starting to dabble in CS), I understand the importance of including that kind of support for teachers.

Do you think this information will be worked into new versions of your PD experiences for teachers, or will you be able to work the information into the teacher materials for your curriculum? We often struggle to make the best decisions on how to make the best use of precious and short PD time (especially when scaling the curriculum beyond a pilot group) so I’d be interested to hear how you handle those decisions.

Thank you for sharing this video. I’d like to learn more about the types of activities you have developed. I can imagine programming the robot to respond to conditions and to move in prescribed ways (dancing?) What are some other activities or activity types that are possible with this robot in a 5th grade classroom?

Very exciting project. It’s neat to see how seeds sown during y’alls time at GSE can be traced to this current work! I had a question about how y’all developed a “language-general” assessment so that kids had a fair shot of demonstrating their coding knowledge at pre-test. Was it the exact same assessment offered at pre/post?

My gut tells me teaching programming with this robot is a winner. I could only imagine how exciting it is for a kid to successfully get that cute robot to do what she wants for the first time.

Do teachers really just need 3 days PD? Seems having a fundation in the whole curriculum (The first 5 chapters cover the fundamentals of robotics and programming (some of the materials can be used as references); In chapters 6 & 7, the students learn the basics of the humanoid robot’s programming software; The remaining chapters (8 -14) cover the different capabilities of the robot and how to program the robot to utilize each of these capabilities in the form of in-class tasks and mini projects. ) is a lot to expect after three days.

Why did you choose to use a Nao robot? They are quite expensive. We have had success with LEGO WeDo, LEGO NXT, and LEGO EV3. Why not use a cheaper robotic kit so that all students can work with the kits at the same time?