If you’re a teacher out there with a unique idea that you use in your classroom, please share it at www.classroomtalk.com    I’d like to get an elementary, middle school and high school page going. Thanks for reading!  Maggie

Robot Unit

My primary unit on robots is a class favorite every year.  The "engineers” in my class design and make their own robots.  A simple version of this would be to use cereal boxes, aluminum foil and anything that you can recycle.  Over the years I’ve had a lot of parental involvement and the final designs are getting more and more sophisticated.  I tie in language arts by having the children write and tell about, “How to Make a Robot,” and they write a fiction story about their robot and a paper on what tasks their robot would perform if it were real.

There are a lot of science, technology and recycling tie-ins as the children learn about machines (how they help us), recycling, reusing, and force and motion.  The children develop an understanding that the computers in our classroom actually have to be programmed by someone to get all that information inside of them. What I like most about this unit is that when you ask the kids what they want to be when they grow up, instead of the standard answers, "veterinarian," "policeman," " doctor," etc, many of them say: “I want to be an engineer.”