We are coming towards the end of the semester and the students have picked core and expansion robots to build from the EV3 software. Gyroboy, puppy, color sorter, robot arm from the core set and tank bot from the expansion set were the chosen bots. Great progress was made on the color sorter, the robot arm and the tank bots. The gryoboy and puppy have been very problematic. After many calls to LEGO Ed by my students, disappointedly, they abandoned gyroboy and moved on to something else.
Today, I had two sets of girls that I worked with on the puppy. I am really conscientious about encouraging girls, but they were getting very frustrated with the puppy build. They made many errors building and had to take it apart to rebuild. I realize that this part of it all, but they just were not into having to do this. I persisted with them and eventually got them to fix the build. Then we noticed that one sensor was plugged into the wrong port and contained too short of chord. With another girl, I was trying to decipher the program that does not seem to work like it does on the video. Frustrating. We figured out how one of the my blocks worked, but the program is so complicated. Then the other group noticed that the puppy can't walk. Argh.
I called LEGO and wrote on the online community and asked if there were written explanations anywhere for what these robots are supposed to do and how they are supposed to respond. There isn't. They only have the videos, which are only moderately helpful. In addition, every LEGO workshop I have been to the instructor has encouraged us as teachers to have the kids write notes above the blocks so that they can go back and read easily what they do. Yet LEGO doesn't do that with their programs. I wish they did because then students and I could learn from their programming.
At the end of class, I spoke to the kids about frustration and problem solving and that is part of this whole venture. Butting up against frustration isn't bad, I told them. It's how you respond to the frustration that is either bad or good. So some important lessons were hopefully learned.
Thanks for reading.
