computer science

After popular request, in this post I explain how to teach the “How to train your robot” class.

The class is split in two parts.

Part 1 – Guess The Robot

The first part is a game called “Guess the robot”. I show kids slides of different robots and they have to guess what the robot is or what it’s special ability is. At the end of the presentation I explain to them how robots work. In addition, I had a real robot that moved when kids clapped or screamed at it. I used it to show the robot parts and we had some fun making it move around.

You should be able to finish this part of the class in 15-20 minutes depending how many questions the kids ask.

Part 2 – Train Your Robot

The basic process was to get all the kids together to explain to them the game. I use my slides to do that. Then I hand out the dictionaries and pen and paper. I gather all the kids an parents and we first act through all the moves. Then I write a simple program on a piece of paper “move forward, turn left, move forward” and I ask kids to show me what it does. After that we start doing the obstacle course (which I have setup before starting the class).

After they get their “robots” to bring back the ball you tell the kids to invent their own “moves” and so they have their parents doing funny stuff 🙂

You should be able to finish this part in 30-40 minutes before the kids’ attention span degrades to zero…

Class Materials

The materials I put together to run the class:

Presentation Slides (and Presenter’s Notes) [Ελληνικά, Deutsch – Christian Mennerich]
A laptop or iPad to show the slides.
The Robot Language Dictionary [Ελληνικά, Deutsch – Rita Freudenberg]
One pen and paper per kid (for kids to write programs and hand them to their robot parents).
A space where you can arrange obstacles (one or two obstacles to make kids add turns to their programs is enough. I used a gym as you can see in the videos posted on Facebook, but I’ve also run the class in a room with chairs arranged as obstacles).
A ball per kid-robot pair (the ultimate goal is for the robot to get the ball and bring it back to the beginning).
Optional yet fun: A real robot. I bought and built my own basic robot ($50). It took about an hour to assemble.

Class Dynamics

Five year olds are better when left alone to create their special moves. They get very creative.
Seven year olds need more guidance because they have too many ideas. They’d rather be told what moves to invent.
I’d recommend no more than 6 kids in the class, so you can have the situation under control.
Try to regroup the kids after their robots get the ball. Explain to them that now they can invent new moves.
Parents beware, you may have a serious workout. Kids love to make you repeat stuff 100 times. I advise to wear comfortable clothes.

I would love to hear your findings and see photos from you running the class at home or school.

I hope we learned something useful today,
DrTechniko

Last Sunday, I taught six kids of ages 5 to 7 how to program. “In what programming language?” you may ask. Well…I didn’t use a programming language, at least none that you know of. In fact, I didn’t even use a computer. Instead, I devised a game called “How To Train Your Robot”. Before I explain how the game works, let me tell my motivation.

I learned how to program during my freshman year at MIT when I was 19. It’s not because I didn’t have a computer at home or I hadn’t heard about programming languages. It was because (a) I thought programming was boring and (b) no one had told me why I should bother. In fact, my computer teacher in high school had told me “you don’t need to waste your time learning how to program. Now we have visual tools to build programs. Programming languages are already obsolete.” That was in 1994 and he was referring to Visual Basic. Luckily for me MIT wiped all that nonsense away in a matter of weeks. But does one need to wait to go to college to get the proper education?

Learning how to program is going to be the most useful new skill we can teach our kids today. More than ever our lives depend on how smart we are when we instruct computers. They hold our personal data and they make decisions for us. They communicate for us and they are gradually becoming an extension of our brains. If we don’t learn programming as part of our childhood, we will never evolve. As the famous futurist, Ray Kurzweil, put it “The only second language you should worry about your kids learning is programming.”

How To Train Your Robot

The game works as follows: every kid is turned into a “robot master” and their mom or dad becomes their “robot”. I give each kid a “Robot Language Dictionary” and explain to them that this is the language their robot understands. The dictionary has symbols for “move left leg forward”, “turn left”, “grab”, “drop” etc.

The goal is for the robots to go through an obstacle course, pick up a ball and bring it back. The kids have to write a program that will tell the robot how to do all that. Every time they write a program, they hand it to their robot and the robot executes it. To do that, I give each kid a pen and paper where they copy symbols from the dictionary to write their programs and off their robots go!

The fun part begins when each robot retrieves the ball. Now I let kids invent their own moves and symbols that they add to their dictionary and then teach their robots. There is no limit to what the kids come up with.

This is my favorite program (written by a five year old girl):

I designed the class to teach some very basic principles of computer science and programming:

Programming languages are just another way to communicate to an entity (via programs).
Programs are recipes for automating stuff.

However, I was pleasantly surprised on how much more the kids learned. On their own they figured out the following things (in a 30-min session):

Program Parametrization: Instead of putting a forward step ten times, they put a 10 in front of the “step” symbol (A five-year-old figure it out and asked me if she could do it).
Composition: Grouping of a set of moves (“move left leg forward, then move right leg forward and do this combo 10 times”)
Abstraction: “Run in a circle, then say “I’m dizzy!” , then call this the “Run Dizzy” program and do it 100 times. (For some reason, kids loved making their parents repeat stuff 100 times over.)
Unit testing: They’d write a test program to get the parents moving a few steps, have their parents run it, then fix it and run it again, and then add a few more steps until they reach the goal.

I’ve ran the class twice now and I’ve seen the same patterns, which support my belief that when kids have fun, they get very smart and creative about programming. Many of the parents plan to play the game at birthday parties. If you have questions about how to set up the game, don’t hesitate to write. You can find my contact info at www.facebook.com/drtechniko.

You can also find instructions on how to teach the class as well as materials I used on this post.