Update 9/3/17 – You can now purchase the Spy School curriculum for Undercover Robots Camp here.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we had our second session of Undercover Robots Camp last week. The theme was, “Pageant Edition,” with the scenario being that the Dash robots had been sent on their first undercover assignments to the Annual Robot Pageant, where they were to investigate a potential saboteur.
Only a few of the students had attended our first session, Spy School, the week before, meaning that there were various levels of skill. This is what I love about programming with open-ended challenges, especially with the Dash robots. The activities allow for the contributions of all abilities.
The week was interspersed with design and logic activities. Of course, costumes needed to be created since it was a pageant. Puzzles needed to be solved to find the identity of the saboteur. I even borrowed some ideas from Breakout EDU.
One of the favorite activities was the pageant interview. The students had to program their robots to respond to my questions – but they didn’t know what the questions would be! I told them to come up with three responses: a plural noun, a verb ending in -ing, and a name of a place. I had a set of questions for each robot, who also had to be programmed to come out on stage and then leave the stage. I embedded an example below (make sure your volume is high so you can hear the robot responses).
The students also had challenges to program their students to do an art project, launch ping-pong balls into cups to gather evidence, and to save the other contestants from the saboteur. The latter is when the students learned that less can be more, as the least elaborate contraption attached the robot actually “saved” the most plastic figures (see the pic with the colored pencils attached to the robot below)!
During the week, we also worked on choreographing a final dance number for the pageant. It’s good we started early because there were many, many, many flub-ups! The video embedded below is what we showed the parents. Unfortunately, it still didn’t go quite as planned; we learned that “tired” robots get a bit rebellious about their programs as their batteries wear down!
I absolutely adored seeing everything the students accomplished last week, and I can’t wait to do Undercover Robots Camp again next summer!
Hi Terri, I have followed your blog for many years. I love the spy camp school on TPT. Do you intend to also publish the pageant edition to TPT? Also, do you ever present at any state gifted conferences?
Hello Sue! Thanks for your comment. I still need to “clean up” my files for the other camps I’ve done before I put them on TPT – probably later this summer. I have not presented at gifted conferences but sometimes present at TCEA and local conferences.