Apparently I forgot to post this months ago, oops.

Three months ago my school instituted a Thursday afternoon elective program for our 4-6th grade students. You can read about the process of getting it started here. We are now coming to the end of the school year and I want to document some stats and make some notes for myself.

Coding and Robotics Elective

Cycle One Stats:

• 6 weeks.
• 20 students, 4 girls, 16 boys.
• 5 robots, 1 Ozobot, 4 Dash robots.

Cycle Two Stats:

• 4 weeks.
• 25 students, 8 girls, 17 boys.
• Pure coding, no robots.

Cycle Three Stats:

• 4 weeks.
• 22 students, 8 girls, 14 boys.
• 18 Ozobots.

Cycle Four Stats:

• 8 weeks
• 20 Students, 7 girls, 13 boys.
• 18 Ozobots

Items of note:

• I needed to plan the 8 week class for the fourth cycle better. I had several repeat students for the first time and they got bored by the end because they didn’t feel there was enough new stuff.
• I need to do more direct instruction. My students didn’t think logically very well and did not access the online help resources effectively.
  • Things to cover
    • recursion
    • loops
    • incrementing counters
    • planning out what the robot needs to do before starting to code.
• 2:1 is best for robots and coding. At 3:1 or higher someone always got left out.

Things to try for next year.

• Take the students and robots to lower grade class and have them buddy up.
• With the longer sessions don’t pull the robots out until the students have coded a bit first.
• Next year we will have elective all year not just spring. I will need to plan for how to keep students engaged longer. Especially since many will have had this elective last year.