Bee Dance with Edison (2PS, ST)

2nd Primary School Of Nea Erythraia (Renata P.)

Invite-only in-person activity

Greek

Psaron 1, 146 71, Nea Erythraia, GRC

1. Goals:

Computational thinking in order to use coding to program Edison Robots, cooperate in teams, learn about the bee dance, to raise awareness of the importance of bees as pollinators, the threats they face and their contribution to sustainable development.

1. Materials required

Edison robots (one robot for every 4 students), lego blocks or paper to make the bees and the flowers. Scissors and glue, pencil and paper, computers or tablets, internet connection to reach ED-Scratch platform (https://cloud.edscratchapp.com/)

1. Description

1rst class- 2hours. 

The students watch a video about the bees. They learn how important are the bees for the world and also that bees dance and what it means. Next, they will be divided into groups of 4 and they will be asked to make little bee models made with lego blocks or paper bees on colourful paper. Each team will have an Edison robot to fit the bee that they made. Moreover, teams can create flowers and a bee hive. 

2nd class - 2 hours

  Children have to set the scenery with the bee robots and the flowers.

The teacher demonstrates a bee dance with an Edison robot as the real bees do. (Real bees when they have found food, they fly in an 8 dance to show the others where and how far it is. Also, the directions that the bee gives to the others are translated into forward, backwards and turn moves)

The students, using their own Edison robots which have transformed into bees are asked to find out the commands (moves) the teacher used in order to replicate the bee dance. Then, they program their Edison robot using the Scratch-based interface EdScratch (https://cloud.edscratchapp.com/) to dance as the teacher’s robot did.

 In the end, each team present their results and how they code the bee dance. 

1. For the final assessment the students play a Kahoot quiz the teacher has prepared.

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