This morning in the AT&T Classroom the Rootstown 4th graders were introduced to Edisons, small programmable robots designed to provide students with hands-on experiences with robotics and programming. Edisons have built-in sensors that respond to light and sound changes and can be programmed to travel lines and communicate with other Edison robots. They are also compatible with LEGO bricks for adding design and building components to Edison projects. The students learned to program their Edisons using EdBlocks, a graphical programming language designed for the Edisons that utilizes a drag-and-drop block-based interface. 
After the students built their expertise with EdBlocks, they used the Edisons in a lesson designed by Miss Gearhart to test the students’ skills for comparing and ordering fractions. The students were given a set of fractions and challenged to work in teams to compare and order the fractions by value. The teams then programmed their Edison to travel to each fraction in that order. The result was an amazing representation of the students’ computational thinking, mathematical reasoning, creativity, and collaboration!
