5th Grade Dash Robot Biography Project

The 5th Graders at Forest Hill Elementary School were hard at work turning Dash into the famous person that they had researched. Rosa Yang, Forest Hill's STEAM Task Force Teacher, helped me plan this project, to integrate the math, literacy, and social studies skills that her students were currently working on. 
Since her students had just finished learning about metric measurement and rounding, we had them put them to the test to make a timeline to scale. Since Dash moves in increments of 10 centimeters, we had students round the lifespan of their famous person to the nearest 10 cm. They were then challenged to place the five most important parts of their person's life on the timeline, starting from their birthdate, rounding each one to the nearest 10 cm. 

The fifth graders then wrote a sentence describing that important life event. They then used the iPad App "Blockly" to program Dash to start at the beginning of the timeline. Each student was then able to record themselves reading each important life event and to have Dash travel down the timeline to describe it. Some of the students even wanted to program Dash to change colors based on the event and some even created a costume or hat to help Dash look more like their person. It was a fantastic way for the students to use math, literacy, and engineering, to truly bring their person to life!

Comments

  1. Anonymous4/06/2016

    Julie, this is inspirational!! Fantastic share!!

    ReplyDelete

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