Innovation: A year (so far) with Imaginative Inquiry Part 5: Robots

This school year I have been exploring the use of Imaginative Inquiry with my third grade students. The theme of the year has focused on innovation and connected with the central topic study in their classrooms around the history of the City of Chicago starting with the Ojibwe People up to the diverse neighborhoods of the current city. I have documented in the last four post the theory of Imaginative Inquiry, the introduction of the mission by the mysterious Agent X and the first missions and challenges.

At this point in the school year the discussion that was happening in the classroom around pioneer life did not fit with the theme of innovation and transportation. I did not want to lose the momentum and engagement of the students so I decided to design an Agent X challenge that focused on collaboration and communication skills. The initial application from Agent X stated that those applying for the mission needed to be good communicators and have strong collaboration skills so this was a good connection and would have robots!

The next message students received from Agent X contained details about the challenge. Students were reminded that collaboration and communication skills were going to be essential to the success of their mission and the this challenge was going to focus on making sure that students were developing these skills. The details of the challenge were included. Students were going to work in small groups and needed to create a masking tape maze for a Dot & Dash robot that was at least eight feet long and had a minimum of six turns. Next the students needed to code the robot to move through the maze.

To complete this challenge students would need to design and plan with their groups. They would need to pay attention to measurement and think about the width and distance the robot could move. Students were also given a time frame to complete this mission and needed to plan their maze making sure they could accomplish it during the two weeks timeline.

Next students starting mapping out their plans, measuring and then taping their mazes on the floor. It was interesting to see how the groups worked together. Some groups divided up responsibilities and all worked from different ends of the maze. Some groups assigned jobs, one was in charge of measurements, one taping, one coding and one map reading. Some coded the maze as they went and some groups taped the whole maze and then programed the robots. It was great were empowered to determine how the they worked with each other and negotiated how their group was going to work together and accomplish the task.

This Agent X mission was a success! The students loved the challenge and stayed engaged in the whole Agent X challenge. They worked on their collaboration and communication skills and continued to develop their coding and robotics experiences.

Up next a connection to the animal world!