Welcome!

Dale Street School was lucky enough to receive 50 Pro-Bots from a generous MCPE grant. We will be using this blogger forum to document our Pilot program integrating the Pro-Bots. It is our hope that our colleagues and the community can benefit from our trials and insights.

Special thank you to the Medfield Coalition for Public Education for making this possible!

Monday, January 11, 2016

What is a Pro-Bot?

Aaaaand we're off!

What's the best way for students to learn about a new product? We believe it is through independent exploration and collaboration! To instill excitement and kick off our pilot Mrs. Cowell and I decided to get both our classes together to deliver a consistent message and learn from one another.

We began by pairing each of her students with one of mine and offering them some ice breakers to get to know one another.

We then had a whole class discussion about how we came to acquire these devices, the reasoning behind why only two classes would begin working with them, and the importance of the work we are hoping to do with their help. 








The students were tasked with developing their own set of rules and guidelines as to how the Pro-Bots should be used.



Then it was time to learn about the devices themselves. With some direction the students worked together to understand what the buttons do and how the programs may work. 


   

Initial successes: It was clear that everyone in the room was very excited about using the Pro-Bots. They were able to work together to develop rules and to figure out the function of some of the keys. It was nice to begin the pilot with students feeling successful. We are aiming to foster students' confidence and independence with programming and technology and today was an EXCELLENT start!


Initial challenges: Some challenges for this lesson were encouraging students to work well with unfamiliar partners.






We are looking forward to jumping in and facilitating a successful pilot program!

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