The Importance of Robotics
Preparing Students for the Future is in Our Hands
In today’s fast-paced technology-driven world, it’s important now more than ever to prepare students for the future. Robots are an integral part of students’ everyday lives and most of them don’t even know it!
Teaching robotics to young students throughout their schooling can increase their ability to be creative and innovative thinkers and more productive members of society. a whole new world to them and exciting opportunities that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. Robotics is a simpler to understand and more tangible introduction to programming. Students have the opportunity to create something tangible and make it perform the actions that they program it to do. Robotics is a field that is easily accessible to a wide range of students with varying talents and skills.
Robotics & Coding Becoming Increasingly Prevalent
As robotics and computers become increasingly prevalent in students’ lives, understanding programming and programming concepts it is becoming very important for students’ success. Robots are a fun, easy, and effective way to learn about computer programming.
Benefits of Robotics in Primary Grade Levels
In primary grades, students learn using their eyes and hands, drawing, molding, and manipulating objects. At this age they are starting to learn by reading. Having the robots to work through problems visually helps students with complex concepts. Robots are a fun way for students to apply and experiment with concepts that they are learning.
Creative Problem Solving
The robots provide another opportunity for creative problem solving. Students should learn to look at a problem in many ways, rather than applying a formula that they are given. When programming robotics, there can be many solutions to a single problem, and different students may take different paths to arrive at a solution. Students get to discuss their processes and the logic that they used to understand different methods and solutions. This opens students to the real world process of problem solving!
Sunburst's Robotic Solutions:
Algorithm Creation and Use
The use of robots teach children to create and use algorithms. An algorithm is a sequence of steps that should be followed in a particular order to achieve a goal. Most students are unaware that so many algorithms are used in their everyday lives. Algorithms like addition in math class are more obvious, but students use algorithms every day when they get ready in the morning or take a certain path to get to school. Even the way they make a sandwich or tie their shoes is an algorithm!
By seeing a task in terms of a set of steps, students learn to break tasks and problems into smaller pieces. This makes problem solving easier! Problem solving involves the skill of breaking complex problems into simpler ones. Once they have broken down a problem, they can see which parts they already know how to solve.
Algorithms also help students understand the passage of time, and learn to relate steps or tasks to each other in terms of time, which is a key lesson at this age. Like the plot of a story, the steps of an algorithm must be performed in a particular order, and students should be encouraged to use words like “first,” “then,” and “finally” when writing algorithms.