This afternoon in the AT&T Classroom the CDC Kindergartners were introduced to Ozobot “Smart” toy robots. The Ozobot is designed to provide children with opportunities to learn simple coding language while also encouraging children’s creativity and skills for problem solving and deductive reasoning. The Ozobot device is programmed to follow black, red, blue, and green lines/paths which control the Ozobot’s movement and speed in different directions. The device has sensors that recognize color sequences (also known as “OzoCodes”) and interprets the sequences as commands for directing speed and movement.
This afternoon the Kindergartners worked in pairs and learned to calibrate their
Ozobots to be able to respond to the coding sequences. Next the children started with an activity to observe the Ozobot’s navigation using a single black color line and then observed the Ozobot’s navigation on lines with varying color code combinations. Building from their observations, the children began to experiment with combining various color sequences to create OzocCodes to alter their Ozobot’s direction and speed.
