How Rolling Robots Spark Engineering Education

We are also thinking along this line to make engineering education fun and enjoyable.  An editor below writes well to make his points.  I was trained to be a journalist (I was trained to be a pianist as well.)  I don't find enough time to write these days.

From Makezine:

A short train ride outside New York City, New Jersey’s South Orange Middle School has a new inhabitant rolling around its classrooms. The diverse yet inclusive Title I public school of about 700 students has a small but influential population of little round robots called Spheros, thanks to librarian Elissa Malespina.

When her son got a Sphero as a present, Malespina immediately recognized its educational potential, and introduced Spheros to her class of multiply disabled students.

“It was amazing because these children were children that, because of their issues, can be hard to get engaged. They have some fine motor issues and stuff like that,” she says. “It really opened up a lot of things we can do with them.”

Malespina’s students have built mazes and played games. She has started a Sphero club at the school, and hopes to eventually teach coding with it. And her efforts are an example of — and an inspiration to — the latest push from Sphero’s manufacturer to bring the toy to schools, and unlock the educational potential that Malespina saw.

So Sphero is a toy. But it’s also a robot, albeit one with an atypical appearance, and its true power is that it’s programmable. Its maker, Orbotix, recognizes this, and is using that potency to drive education via a new program called SPRK — “Schools, Parents, Robots, Kids.” Programming can be challenging, and building a toy with an understandable interface — the Sphero app — is one way to make it accessible.

But upon seeing what educators were doing, Ingram and the Orbotix crew decided to replicate the idea on a larger scale. They now offer discounted multi-Sphero packs for educators, and free tutorials and lesson plans from basic robot control to advanced programming challenges. It’s an opportunity to facilitate interests in programming, math, and science, while selling Spheros and engaging with the makers the company grew up with.

“Educators are looking for this,” says Ingram. “It solves that problem of, How do we reach young kids, how do we get them introduced to engineering and programming?”

http://makezine.com/2014/05/13/how-rolling-robots-spark-engineering-education/