Australia – Tale-Bot Pro – Pre-school

Location

Sholem Aleichem College Australia

How many kids are in a group

6

How was the MatataStudio robot(s) used?

We began by familiarising the students with the Tale-Bot controls by using the zoo map. This was a good way of introducing the switching on and off and other basic controls. Although the students loved the activity and enjoyed hearing Tale-Bot speak, I felt that this was too passive an activity for Preps and would be better suited to kinder students. Consequently the next lesson we spent time investigating the controls and then challenged each other to send Tale-Bot to various places. This activity brought out a lot of discussion about what buttons did what and how you could use them. For this we did not use one of the ‘official’ mats, just the floor. The next lesson the students had to work out how to make Tale-Bot travel through a maze. Initially we worked as a group, breaking each section up and checking our work prior to moving to the next section. The students then broke into groups of three to create their own maze and code Tale-Bot to travel through it. It was pleasing to see the students working collaboratively, using the coloured lights to check and correct their instructions as they went through the track. During our next lesson, the students were keen to make Tale-Bot draw so, as they had just learnt about 2D shapes, we worked out how to draw a square, diamond and rectangle. This created the opportunity to have some interesting discussions about right, left, right angles, length, width and diagonals – apparently Tale-Bot does not have a diagonal button.

What skills did it develop?

Listening, turntaking, collaborating, coding, one-to-one correspondence, 2Dshapes.

What worked best and what was challenging?

The best was:

The drawing features was really useful.

The challenging part was:

It was challenging for the young students to understand when a second page of instructions were in use and they couldn’t see the first set of movements, but it was great for them to see the first page of instructions appear once the ‘go’ button was pressed.

How did students respond?

The students loved playing with Tale-Bot. They related to it like you would relate to a beloved pet. They particularly enjoyed the dance feature, but I struggled to find a academic way of using this in a class.