Schuyler Achievement Academy fourth and fifth graders took part in a technological turkey trot on Monday, using their STEM smarts to design paths for tiny robot “turkeys” to march in a fictional Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
The robots are actually ozobots, wheeled devices about the size of a paddle ball that recognize and respond to different combinations of the colors red, blue, green and black. Each color combination makes the robot move in a different way; students used algorithms to create different paths to control the robots.
Students spent an hour in the school tech lab with Laurie Ellis, a STEM instructional coach at Schuyler, and district technology coaches Sooyun McCarthy and Terrance McNally.
The young engineers coded their ozobots through mazes, along pathways they created, and around outlines of a turkey and their hand.
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