Another parent and I are planning a elementary school science night on robotics at an elementary school in Arlington VA. If anyone has ideas for good projects for a 90min science night where kids move from station to station please let us know. The school has a pretty good computer lab and a number of parents interested in getting kids programing and building robots.
Chris
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MrShah has an excellent example in "Pattern Maker". It shows all of the "code" that is required, and is one that could be built pretty quickly and altered (he has some variations that don't show all of the code). I think that it's an excellent starting place, posting a print-out of the "program picture" and providing a helper, would let kids put the program together. (Maybe have all of the blocks already pulled out so they just have to be "assembled".)
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/MrShah/29484
If you have a couple of computers available, you may want to also show something that the kids can imagine turning into a "game". (A full-blown game may not be good, as it could "tie up" a computer.) There are lots of examples, I'm partial to some that I put together.
Simple: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/EdnaC/37711
A bit More: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/EdnaC/37504
Or: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/EdnaC/34922
Last edited by EdnaC (2007-09-21 13:45:45)
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Check out
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/family-science-night/
for my notes on a science night I did last year at my son's school.
One of the stations was a demonstration of scratch programs written by kids in my afterschool Tech Club. It was quite popular, and may have contributed to the attendance at this year's Tech Club.
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