Last year, we participated in the robot finch
loan program offered through BirdBrain Technologies, the company which manufactures the devices. The robot finch is a wonderful coding tool that provides students with hands-on coding opportunities. The students enjoyed these so much that our technology teachers, Mrs. Lambert and Mr. Kwietniewski, decided to buy them for their STREAM program. This opened up some great opportunities for our library program to collaborate with STREAM.
The robot finch can be controlled with many programming languages. Our students used Scratch to control the finches. The finch comes equipped with two wheel motors, LED lights, a temperature sensor, buzzer, and touch sensors. These capabilities provided students with seemingly endless programming opportunities. The hands-on nature of the robot finches also made it fun and easy for students to see their programming skills come to life!
After some reflection on last year, we decided that sixth grade would be the grade level that would work most in-depth with the robot finches. Instead of sticking with just an hour of code in December, Mrs. Lambert's sixth graders visited the library throughout all of December to work with the finches! Each section enjoyed three full class periods for this project.
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| Learning how to code with the finches. |
On the first day of the finch project, students received a brief introduction to the finches, including how to set up the finch on the student laptops, how to properly care for the finches, and which Scratch coding commands would be useful for their programs. Students were then instructed to work in groups of 2-3 to complete a finch tutorial. This packet, adapted from the
finch education website, introduced students to finch features and some coding strategies.
Once students had completed the tutorial, they were invited to participate in a challenge of their choosing. There were four coding challenges the groups could choose from: traffic light, dance party, remote control, and drawbot. Each of the challenges were adapted from beginner level Scratch lessons found on the
finchrobot.com website. There were a number of groups that were able to tackle multiple challenges during their project time in the library.
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| Teams spread out in the library to work on their challenges. |
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| DrawBot was a favorite challenge for this year! |
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| Multiple groups participated in the DrawBot challenge. |
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| It's great seeing your program come to life! |
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| Masking tape mazes helped students tackle the remote control challenge. |
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| There's lots of room in the library to spread out! |
Overall, we were very pleased by the creativity and effort displayed by the STREAM students. The robot finch project was a great way to celebrate #hourofcode and get students some hands-on coding time. When Mrs. Lambert asked her students how they enjoyed their time in the library, many mentioned that they would have liked additional time with their finches! A special thank you to Mrs. Lambert for making this possible!
