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Students in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) use Bee-Bots as part of the district's K–2 Computer Science curriculum. All the activities in Unit 2 at each level use Bee-Bot! Read more about their Red Level, Orange Level, and Yellow Level.
Before starting a Bee-Bot activity, the teacher assigns each student a job role, giving them responsibility for one area of the coding project. With a job title, students have a stake in the result, are engaged in the task, and learn to communicate and work as a team.
The Designer selects the challenge for Bee-Bot to complete, or explains the activity the teacher has assigned. He or she decides where Bee-Bot starts and keeps track of how many tries it takes to succeed.
The Navigator uses command cards (more below) to plan Bee-Bot's path and reads the commands out loud to the Driver.
The Driver waits until the Navigator lays out the cards for the entire program and then presses only the buttons for each card that the Navigator reads.
The Debugger points to each step in the plan as Bee-Bot moves, and finds and helps fix bugs and errors.
As the SFUSD curriculum states:
"Students should work in small groups to program robots. These groups ideally include 3–4 students, though 2–5 students can also work. Students learn to collaborate and communicate when working in these small groups. It’s important to model and rehearse some group communication skills and sentence stems. By using defined roles, students learn to work better together. Students should rotate roles often."
The SFUSD website offers lots of Bee-Bot and Blue-Bot activities that you can use in your classroom today!
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