Activities

My Robotic Friends

My Robotic Friends is an activity developed by Thinkersmith. This activity is designed to teach students about Coding a solution to a problem, using an unplugged approach. An unplugged activity is one that doesn’t involve the use of computers at all. One of the most well-known collections of these unplugged activities is CSUnplugged.

In this activity we will split into two groups - programmers and robots. The programmers will write an algorithm (step-by-step and precise instructions) for building a stack of cups using six different symbols. The robots will have to follow this algorithm without any assistance from the programmers.

We will provide you with a worksheet for this activity, the original (and more detailed) version of this is available to download here.

While the programmers write their algorithm, the robots will be introduced to Scratch. After the programmers have finished writing their algorithms they will swap with the robots and do the Introduction to Scratch tutorial.

Introduction to Scratch

Scratch is a free tool that can be used for creating games, interactive stories and animations. There is also a Scratch community where students can share their work and collaborate on projects together.

In this activity we will work through an Introduction to Scratch tutorial, which shows some short examples of what you can do with Scratch. There are many things you can do in Scratch that go beyond the examples in this tutorial. Some resources that we recommend for finding out more about Scratch are: Code Club’s tutorials, Google’s CS First tutorials and Harvard’s Creative Computing Curriculum guide.

We will provide you with a copy of the Introduction to Scratch tutorial but it is also available to download here.

If you are planning to use Scratch with your students, we highly recommend you register for a Scratch Teacher Account and manage your students’ accounts through that.

If you already familar with Scratch and have completed the Introduction to Scratch tutorial already, then we have another tutorial titled Making Cookie Bird that you can download and work through.