Tuesday, April 21, 2015

A Drive through the Zoo: Learning about Angles using Pro-Bot

My child's class started learning about angles about a week ago. And the teacher requested me to design an exercise for Pro-Bot that will introduce the idea of angles. As the kids are very new to the concept, I wanted to keep this one fairly simple, while still using a mix of acute, obtuse and right angles.

A trip to the zoo is almost always part of our field trips every school year. The zoo in our city happens to have buses that drive along the various points of interest/ themed animal enclosures. I felt that the turns made by the bus in this familiar setting of the zoo, might be a good way to introduce angles.

In this exercise, a scaled down version of the bus route, provides the path for Pro-Bot to drive on. As the Bot drives along the path, it is required to make angular turns at each point. I have provided the angular measurements required in degrees and distances in centimeters. The bus travels in a loop, the directions are shown using arrows. Note that the map below is not drawn to scale.





Based on the above map, write a program for Pro-Bot to drive along the following paths, assuming that the Pro-Bot is facing in the forward direction:
  1. The path from the Entrance of the zoo to the African Savanah. How many turns did the Pro-Bot make? Were the angles acute, obtuse or right angles?
  2. To continue from the African Savanah (where you stopped before), to the Elephants enclosure, how many degrees did the Pro-Bot turn? 
  3. Program the path from the African Savanah to the Raptors. How many turns did the Pro-Bot make? Were the angles acute, obtuse or right angles?
  4. Continue the path from the Raptors to the Kids' Play Area. Did you use acute, obtuse or right angles for the turns?
Alternatively, the kids can be asked to program the entire bus route as a single program, marking the types of angles used along the way.


Saturday, April 11, 2015

A Food Chain: Made from Scratch

Here is a Scratch project that my 9-year-old put together, depicting a Food Chain in the Northern Temperate Forests. An avid lover of animals, this project combining learning in two areas, was a very fun one for him. I loved the fact that he could create a presentation about an ecosystem, while combining his learning with art, storytelling and programming. A good example of an interdisciplinary project...

This project took him a few weeks to create, including the time for the initial research about the ecosystem. We went through the project in small steps, designing the various stages... deciding on the characters in the food chain, the order in which they appear, special effects if any, etc. As you can see from the progression along the length of the project, more special effects started appearing as he learned more about creating animations.

Major learnings for my child were:
  • Using "show" and "hide" instructions to make characters appear and disappear in the story.
  • Timing -- using the wait statement and figuring out how long to wait, before each sprite makes its appearance on screen.
  • Animation: Creating multiple costumes for a sprite and alternating between them to create the effect of movement.
  • Changing the size of a sprite to create the visual effect of distance.
  • Creating and using different backdrops at various points to create the effect of multiple scenes.
  • Using XY coordinates to decide on positions of the sprite at various points of the presentation.







Note:

This project simulating a food chain, could potentially be a Grade 5 class project. Food chains are part of the Grade 5 syllabus; the description can be found here on the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) website. The students are expected to  "develop an understanding of the idea that plants get the materials they need for growth chiefly from air and water. Using models, students can describe the movement of matter among plants, animals, decomposers, and the environment and that energy in animals’ food was once energy from the sun".