Two Pierre Van Cortlandt Middle School classes put their robotics skills on display during a “Dancing with the Bots” competition.
Students in Rachel Lang’s and Alison Romm’s homerooms entertained their peers and faculty members with the robots they built themselves and taught how to dance.
The LEGO Robotics initiative represented the culmination of the classes’ engineering unit, which requires students to ask, imagine, plan, create and improve.“As we worked our way through this unit, I introduced a new phase with each new task/experiment,” said Lang. “With LEGO Robotics, the students had to use the entire process to build and program a successful robot.”
In Lang’s classroom, students enjoyed plenty of laughs and attempts until one group was crowned the winner.“It took us numerous times to actually build our robot, until eventually, we decided to stick to the book,” winning team Bot Co.’s members Aliyah, Ella, Maria and Sofia said. “We had a lot of laughs and fun in the making and programming of our robot, and we were so surprised we won.”
In Romm’s classroom, the Panda Eagle Ballerina Palm Trees team was victorious. “When programming our robot, we had lots of trial and error,” group members Anneka, Emma, Kate and Molli said. “However, when we built our robot, it was much easier because we already had the experience from our previous challenges. One thing that made the programming difficult was being able to include all of the challenge requirements, including two working sensors. In the end, we worked it all out, and had a fabulous experience.”“This is such a rewarding experience for me and the students, to watch them grow and problem solve,” said Lang. “I live for those ‘light bulb’ moments that often happen during programming. I am so proud of all my students on their growth during this engineering unit and everything they we able to accomplish; it was no easy task.”
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