Students in Ms. Bethany Morse's kindergarten class and Ms. Allison Forgie's first grade class had some special visitors on Tuesday, as Director of STEAM and Innovation Ms. Tina Dietrich arranged for a handful of students from the high school stopped by to help the younger students learn more about their VEX Robotics kits.
The high school students take classes with Mr. Aaron Minor and Mr. Paul Beard, and they volunteered to help Ms. Morse's and Ms. Forgie's classes with a special task.
Each group had colorfully drawn bunny positioned on one of the VEX 123 robots. The students had to use the buttons on the robot to program it to travel a certain number of spaces and make the right number of turns to find some plastic eggs on the play mat.
The activity helped the students work on their counting, their directions, their ability to solve problems, their teamwork, and their communication skills. The students could ask the high schoolers questions, and they also had a chance to see the bigger robots that the high school students use in their classes.
As a demonstration, the high school students lined part of the classroom with red tape and programmed their robot so that it would stay within the boundary set by the tape.
Everyone had a lot of fun!