As part of their investigation into physics concepts, the Longcoy second graders have been working with
Ozobot Bits - small “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 and interprets them as commands for directing speed and movement.
After the students developed an understanding of the color codes for programming the Ozobots, the students learned to code their Ozobots by combining various color combinations and sequences to alter their Ozobot ’s direction and speed to navigate a path. Building from their hands-on coding, the second graders learned to do digital coding using OzoBlockly, a web-based tool that utilizes a block-based programming language. The tool is designed to allow children to visually learn programming concepts by dragging blocks of commands and fitting them together to build code.
