June 30th, 2020

Activity Summary

This session reinforces the use of one-action instructions to direct a robot (mini car) within a virtual environment (safari) to a specific location (animals). Each student was given an iPad with the C2LC coding environment loaded for exploration of a virtual safari environment. Students could use touch to select one-step actions (i.e. moving up, down, turn) to navigate robot movements within the specific grid path in the virtual environment. At this session, students were required to first build their sequences before being able to see it in action. 

Direction Dance: To begin, a video was played (at a slower playback speed) to help student(s) understand directions of up, down, right and left. Students were encouraged to follow along with physical movement. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5ERcDnOnKg)

C2LC Coding Environment Introduction: In the following activity, students were introduced to the C2LC coding environment. After the review of the available three actions in the coding environment (Move, Turn Right, Turn Left), the facilitator used lego blocks to provide a familiar and tangible example of how a sequence can be built using those three actions. 

In-home Robot Dance: Students were encouraged to plan a dance choreography of three actions using the C2LC coding environment. First time, the parent/sibling danced the choreography the student had built on the C2LC coding environment. The second time, the facilitator programmed a sequence and played a piece of music to go with it and asked the students and their family members to dance to the choreography.  

Main Activity (Rescue Mission): One facilitator shared her screen with a series of small sequence building activities. First, students were introduced to each activity on the screen. Then they were asked to build their proposed sequence to complete the activity on their iPad. Once they were ready, the facilitator would rebuilt their program on the shared screen and then played their program. Every time students selected a wrong step, a specific sound effect indicated the wrong action. We were trying to avoid building a wrong path from the start as debugging wan't the goal of this session. In the future, more options for debugging should be provided. 

In the first few small activities, students were only able to use the Move button to build their sequences. As students progressed, they were able to use the Turn right and Turn left movements to build more complex programs. In this session, we didn't provide a specific step for Turn right/left and they were integrated into the program as it was being built. Each movement was associated with an audio label. Once the program was running, the helicopter lights were ON to indicate the direction of the movement and the smoke behind the helicopter showed the completed steps. Different sound effects were also associated with Move and Turns. In the interactive prototype used for this session, the direction of Move arrows changed depending on where they were inserted into the program. 

Goals

• Reinforce directions (move and turn)
• Familiarize right and left directions 
• Reinforce number of steps required
• Introduce concepts of planning a combination of steps
• Introduce drag and drop interaction with C2LC coding environment

Notes from the session

• Student watched and was more focused on the screen to see actions
• Student preferred to press ‘play’ after each step (likes to see effect right away)
• Student responded well to sound feedback on selecting actions

Notes for C2LC design

• Provide more forgiveness for drag and drop interaction
• Provide option to pause/play program
• Direction of the Move arrows are confusing consider changing them depending on the context
• Integrate storytelling, animated visuals, visual and sound cues anywhere possible, but provide an option to disable them if not needed by an end user