INSTRUCTIONS TO A ROBOT
11/05/26“Hands-on learning through robotics significantly improves problem-solving skills, teamwork, and conceptual understanding in mathematics and engineering subjects”
Sofia Serholt
As you have seen, during this course we have been working on board games and the role of a well-written set of instructions. We reflected on the characteristics of a good instructive text and we agreed that it needed to be CLEAR, PRECISE, DETAILED and SEQUENCED. If the person reading the text and following the instructions does not manage to get the final product (final product being a soup, a game or a piece of furniture), we have to consider that, PROBABLY, there is a mistake in the text.
One way to prove this was to interact with robots. Robots are machines that cannot think by themselves and just follow the instructions that the humans give to them. We practised with Codey Rocky, an educational robot that can move, talk and show expressions through its LED screen. We had to read very carefully the instructions to turn on the machine and connect it to the computer. Once this was done, it was time to start programming to complete the different challenges. Of course, to communicate with the robot we used a set of instructions that looked like puzzle pieces and were quite easy to understand… They were in English!

It seemed very easy at first but we soon realized that making the robot move the way we wanted them was quite a complicated task. We had to read the challenge very carefully, understand it and work in a team to organize the ideas. It was also necessary to review mathematical concepts like angles… it is not the same to turn right 90º or turn right 45ª!
Do you think we did it correctly at the first try? NO, of course! We made a lot of mistakes but it was ok. Making mistakes is natural and, in computing, it forces us to revise the program, understand it, locate the mistake and correct it. Isn’t this a thinking process that we constantly do in our daily life?

The challenges were sequenced according to its complexity and we worked at our own rhythm. If you want to look at the challenges, click on the link.
This is one of the challenge: make the robot move in the shape of a SQUARE.
Which answer do you think is the correct one? A or B?













