Blue-Bot Boogie

In September 2014, a new computing curriculum was introduced in the UK to teach coding concepts to children as young as 4. For many teachers, particularly in primary schools, this change  has meant that they are expected to learn new set of skills they were previously unfamiliar with. There have been some great initiatives across the country to engage those who are not comfortable with teaching children to code. Teacher Training Institutions have played a large part in this, adapting their programmes prepare the next generation of teachers for this radical shift. 


If we want to inspire our nation’s children to engage with the new curriculum, we need inspirational teachers in the classroom. Primary teachers need to be inspired to teach the computing curriculum in creative and engaging ways, to capture the imaginations of their learners and bring a subject often perceived as ‘dry’ to life.


The goal of this book is to provide a platform for this by highlighting an idea for best practice developed in the Plymouth Institute of Education involving the programming and control of a fleet of dancing floor-robots! The activity can be run for trainee teachers in their training Institution or H.E. environment or by the teachers themselves in their teaching practice within a school environment. Students will control a group of Blue-Bots to create a dance sequence, produce a short film of the resulting routine and then present this to others in the class to decode the original algorithms and sequences. 


As well as supporting teachers to teach the new primary computing curriculum, the ideas in this book are intended to be springboards rather than ends in themselves. My hope is that they are expanded upon to teach transferrable coding ideas, media production skills and a host of other things to inspire a new generation of learners to engage with the rapidly advancing world around us and the digital technologies that make this possible. 


Anyone for a Robot Dance-Off?!