Tech Tuesdays: Decorative Paper with Root Robots

This is part of a series on Tech Tuesdays where educators can try technology to incorporate into their lessons. For more information on Tech Tuesdays, see the first Tech Tuesday post.

The theme this week was "Using Robots to Design Wrapping Paper". Intrigued, we showed up and were introduced to Root, a robot originally developed at Harvard to teach coding. Currently, iRobot owns Root and their webpage gives more details about its capabilities.

Root comes with three levels: graphical coding (for non-readers), hybrid coding (for readers who are learning to code, similar to Scratch), and full text coding (for readers comfortable with coding). As an ex-programmer, I especially appreciated the last level since there are several block coding applications out there, but none which seems to have bridged over to text coding which they would need at higher levels.

My 3rd grader had minimal coding experience, so she jumped into hybrid/block coding. As a start, she learned to draw a line using the default length. This was pretty fun for a while, and she experimented with loading the robot with different color markers, changing the length and getting it to turn.

She was then challenged to draw a triangle.This was actually quite difficult - mainly because we had only covered basic definitions in geometry: right angles, types of triangles including right angle. Furthermore, you are coding from the perspective of the robot so even if you know the interior angle of the triangle, you have to tell the robot to turn the supplementary angle  Tough stuff, but through trial and error she eventually figured it out.

Final challenge: Now that she had code to draw triangles, she was asked to draw a pattern using them. This was basically adding loops to the logic. There were some quirks at times, e.g. when the robot ran off the paper, or if the surface beneath wasn't sufficiently flat the patterns came out wobbly, but she treated them as part of the learning process.

Add some colors and we'll have modern-looking paper

If you are familiar with Turtle graphics, a mainstay of programming education, you'll recognize the Root robot is basically turtle programming except you see your results in real life rather than onscreen. This makes it a satisfyingly tactile learning experience. The robot is also well constructed - we dropped it once, and it was none the worse for wear (not that we recommend you try this!).

Educators, including homeschoolers: The San Mateo County Office of Education STEAM Center has Root Robots which you may check out. You may also want to check out an iPad as the program is done exclusively through their app.