Why Teach Kids Coding with Robotics?
As educators, I believe it is our responsibility to equip students with the necessary skills and knowledge to develop their dispositions to be successful in the future. This includes preparing students for roles in the community and jobs that do not even exist yet. Even though we do not know what these roles and jobs may look like, we do know the key skills the new world of work will demand for workers and businesses to be successful. Students need to be innovative, creative, problem solvers, collaborate and have high level communication skills with a range of people. Having a Robotics and Coding program in your school, is an engaging and modern tool for teaching students these key skills.
Phase 1- Robotics Introduction
My approach to introducing Robotics and Coding in the classroom is to use a real-world robotics application mixed with the feeling of a competitive game. This approach is captivating for students as it generates excitement and interest, encouraging student participation.
Just look at games such as Fortnite. It had 3-4 million people play the game concurrently in January this year and at the time of writing this post, has 350 million registered users. The simple fact is most kids love to play games and they learn best when playing.