Location

Agrupamento de Escolas de Alberto Sampaio Portugal

How many kids are in a group

4 groups of 9 students

How was the Matatalab robot(s) used?

We used the robot as a mean to develop a STEM project, called “Animals of the World”. Students research about animals, starting by the animals that surround us, domestic and wild. Afterwards, Students research about animals in different parts of the world and its characteristics. We introduced TaleBot in the beginning of the project. In a first approach, students got familiarised with the robot, exploring it autonomously and learning the different functions of the buttons. Afterwards, the robot was used directly in the first phase of the project, where students were challenged to research and talk about the farm animals, so they built a farm, using construction bricks, and placed it in the Town Map. The activity consisted in choosing an animal, explain its characteristics, such as body, skyn, fur, legs, …, then, students had to carry the animal in Tale’s wings and code the robot to transport the animal to the farm. Developing the project, we used the Zoo Map, and started exploring different animals, that don’t live nearby, but we can see at the zoo. The methodology used was the same, but we started to add some obstacles for the robot to overcome. By applying robots to the project, we concluded that the students’ motivation largely increased, which contributed to very meaningful learnings, also the acquisition of some content, usually considered quite difficult to acquire, such as laterality, was achieved faster in a more engaging and meaningful way. We are still developing the project and the robot will be used in different challenges and levels of difficulty.

What skills did it develop?

Introducing the robot was very useful to help students acquire communication, collaboration, and computational thinking skills.

What worked best and what was challenging?

The best was:

I believe that all the work was quite positive.

The challenging part was:

The most challenging was not having a robot for each student, as they aren’t very keen on waiting or passing turns 🙂

How did students respond?

Students fell in love with tale from the to to engage them both in coding and in the project development very beginning, which made it very simple.