Well, today we launched robotics in the 7th grade. Since the "new" schedule has not gone into effect yet, I saw only 2 of Christine's 3 classes (701 and 702). I thought the response was terrific. I did a demo consisting of having a robot travel on top of a set of (black) desks until it found a strip of white paper. At that point it reversed directions until the robot "saw" something (a hand, pencil, my face, etc.) directly in front of it, then it repeated the process ad infinitum.
Not only did this spark some wonderful conversation about what caused this behavior (was the robot looking for more light or less light?) but (without any prompting) lots of "what if" questions arose. "What if the lights were turned off?" "What if the paper was blue instead of white?" "What if we used white chalk on colored paper?"
Of course, once the questions were asked there were stabs at expected outcomes... So, we suddenly had a room full of 7th grade scientists posing problems and coming up with hypotheses.
This is going to be fun!
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