Elementary Robots: Dance Like a Robot Unplugged Activity- FREE Resource

At ISTE '22 this year, I was given the opportunity to share my passion for teaching elementary students robotics with a fantastic group of educators. Being a computer teacher for many years, I even spent my pre-teaching days teaching 3 and 4-year-olds computers in a local daycare here in Western New York before landing my first teaching job, I was excited to share and learn from others. Especially after not being with humans for so long due to the pandemic. Throughout my career, I have been a strong advocate for Computer Science. I was humbled by the experience of sharing the workshop, eRobots: Robots for the Elementary Classroom, with a broader audience outside of my hometown.

Over the next few days, I will share a variety of the resources I have created, either when I was a teacher in the classroom or for this specific workshop.

First up is Dance Like a Robot. After discussing the importance of teaching young students computational thinking, I focused on how our littles learn- they learn by doing. Well, that, and play. Play is vital.

We collectively discussed algorithms and how we can teach such a concept to younger students. During this time, I spoke about unplugged ways to teach students the idea of coding. Our first activity was to program yours truly to walk to the door using nothing but verbal commands.

After a few bugs and laughs, we moved on to the Dance Like a Robot Unplugged Activity, where my participants followed a series of commands to perform a dance.

Little did they know that they would eventually end up dancing to the Bills Make Me Wanna to Shout song- but I never made any promises from the get-go. After, we collaborated and shared ideas of how we could further teach students concepts such as algorithms, bugs, debugging, and programming.

So please, feel free to make a copy of Dance Like a Robot. I recommend duplicating the slides to make the dance come to life. You can also print the activity and hold up one card at a time. It is created as 8.5"x11" for ease of print.

Please, let me know how it turns out. And feel free to share your activities as well!