Girl Scouts Robotics

I volunteered to lead a short robotics workshop for my daughter's Girl Scouts troop (made up of Daisies and Brownies, ages 5-9). For this young age group, the goal was to explore basic concepts of robotics and coding. Another objective was to generate an excitement for technology in these girls' minds and deliver a strong message that robotics, programming, and engineering are something they could do (not just for the boys). The theme for the workshop was Mars exploration. These slides cover the basics and include a number of interviews and profiles of female engineers and scientists that are doing fantastic work in space exploration.

The Girl Scouts organization uses well-defined set of criteria for different learning activities, through which the scouts earn badges to recognize their accomplishments. For robotics, a small booklet describes the basic curriculum for programming, designing, and showcasing robots. For the first of these three topics, the booklet recommends exploring by programming a "robot friend" to navigate a course. In the workshop for my daughter's troop, I chose to take a slightly more involved approach to this concept, using a DIY board game as a way to teach the fundamentals of programming:

To achieve this, I prepared a number of puzzles, similar to the ones above (left) and printed them on regular 8.5x11 paper. We also had 2-inch square "coding cards" with the different commands, printed on card stock and cut out with scissors so that they could be used as a board game. A transparent sheet protector was used to help the teams of two work as "programmer" and "robot" and validate their "code". This worksheet goes over how the activity played out.

But prior to letting the girls play with these board games, we explored together how the commands work and this required an easy way to show them. To this end, I put together a very quick and dirty Scratch program that implements the coding challenge in an interactive way. You can see it here.

Overall, the activity was quite successful. The concept of coding in this context seemed to "click" with most of the girls and they were able to do the activity afterwards.

Want to make your own version of this coding activity? You can download the files for the board game from this link. You can use or modify the Scratch coding game linked above or use the slides as a reference.