The addition of robotics to Darlington’s fifth- and sixth-grade science curriculum is just one more way the Middle School is illustrating its mantra “hands on, minds on.”
“This year, our goal is to introduce every student in fifth and sixth grade to robotics,” said Angela Pieroni, science teacher. “Each grade will take five weeks of it with me, beginning with sixth grade this first semester. A large number of our sixth-graders have already had a little bit of experience with robotics, so there’s a good bit of enthusiasm and excitement. We just started on Monday, and today one of the kids walked out and said, ‘This is my favorite class.’ I have no doubt they’ll be hooked.”
The robotics curriculum does not focus on the building of the robots, but instead on programming, problem solving and iterative design.
“Students will learn that in order to get from point A to point Z, they have to work all the steps in between,” Pieroni said. “They’ll see that they have to test each step and sometimes redo it. This is essentially an eighth-grade curriculum skill that they’ll develop in fifth and sixth grade.”
Students will work in pairs to conquer specific challenges, each of which involves programming their robot to perform various tasks that relate to real-life scenarios. A video trainer will walk them through the challenges.
“During each challenge, we will watch a video that shows the students how the challenge that their programming is actually something that has been done in real life,” Pieroni said. “For instance, on one challenge they will program the robot to go into a tunnel, sense a dark line, drop a patch, reverse out of the tunnel and then report by diagnostics how far into the tunnel the patch was left. In real life, this might represent a gas main break where a robot is sent in to patch the leak.”
According to Pieroni, the hands-on nature of robotics allows the students to experience a variety of scientific principles that make them much easier to understand.
“Each challenge incorporates many mini-lessons,” she said. “For instance, in the gas main challenge you have to understand that light is reflected and that different amounts are reflected from different colors. That’s the reason why the robot has to be programmed to sense the difference between light and dark. Sound is another one – when you clap, it’s not just an up it’s an up and a down, so when you program a computer it has to read both the up and the down. That’s all science related, but they’re going to learn it by using robots.”
Another appealing thing about robotics is the cross-curricular element, which aligns perfectly with what the Middle School is already doing with humanities in fifth and sixth grade.
“So many things are incorporated,” Pieroni said. “The Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) initiative is a national focus in education right now. The National Science Foundation is really pushing that. Robotics plays into that so naturally because in programming you’re using the iterative design, you’re problem solving and in working as a team you’re communicating. You’re also combining mathematics in figuring the rotation of the wheels as well as the distance and the turning radius. It comes to life. You can’t separate out the math in robotics, you can’t separate out the problem solving, it all naturally occurs and flows together. Fluidly, it’s really exciting to see.”
To prepare for the year, Pieroni attended a one-week training course offered by Carnegie Mellon and the National Robotics Engineering Center’s Robotics Academy in Philadelphia.
“I got there and I was hooked,” she said. “Class would start at 9 a.m., but I would be there as soon as the doors opened at 8:30 a.m. to start playing with the programs and tweak the challenge from the previous day. It didn’t matter where you were in your knowledge of robotics, you learned so much more. We were all students in a sense because we were all learning, but it was great because they talked constantly about how to translate that to the classroom when we put on our teacher hats.”
Pieroni said she hopes integrating robotics into the science curriculum will help grow Darlington’s robotics program and get students interested early on. Her goal next year is to spend the first semester coaching teams to compete in First Lego League events. FLL tournaments are held regularly throughout the country; in fact, the Middle School will host an FLL Regional Qualifying Tournament on Nov. 13.
“The best thing we can do is get people here for the tournament to see it in action,” Pieroni said. “You wouldn’t believe the number of people who came last year just to observe or volunteer that walked up to us afterwards asking how to build and program their own robots.”
At the Upper School, robotics enthusiast Owen Kinney is now offering a year-long independent study course in robotics for advanced science and math students. These students will be divided into two teams that will represent Darlington at the 2010-11 First Tech Challenge (FTC).
“Like the Middle School, we are using a Carnegie Mellon tutorial to learn the software, although we will only be following these guidelines for a few weeks,” Kinney said. “On Sept. 12, First Robotics will release this year’s challenge to teams around the world and our kids will be off to the races. In the FTC, there are no instructions or tutorials, the kids must use their skills to develop engineering and programming solutions to complex tasks. Also, as part of our new independent study requirements, all Upper School robotics students are required to log 10 hours of robotics coaching for younger kids.
"Robotics is not new territory for us, but the idea of integrating it into the classroom is," he continued. "Darlington has had a robotics team at the Lower and Middle Schools for the past four years. Last year, our Middle School team competed with 20+ schools from around the state in a tournament that we hosted last December. The previous year our kids competed and won an award for teamwork at a large tournament in Atlanta. We have also hosted community-wide summer camps in Lego Robotics for Middle School kids for the past three years. I have been cheerleading for robotics for the last three years, and I am very happy that the program is growing."
