Using Bee-Bot to Teach Sequencing
Mallory Jurkash is a STEM Innovation Teacher at Cedar Elementary School, part of Avon Community Schools in Indiana. She uses Bee-Bot in her classroom, but not just as a great tool for teaching programming; she also finds it integrates easily across the curriculum. One area that Mallory particularly finds Bee-Bot useful for is sequencing.
When learning about scientific concepts, Mallory’s students program Bee-Bot to move to each stage of the life cycle of a bird, lizard, or other creature. They discover new facts at each stop and the act of programming Bee-Bot helps solidify the sequence of events in their minds. In Language Arts you might find Mallory’s students using Bee-Bot to travel through stages of a story such as Little Red Riding Hood.
Other ideas for incorporating sequencing with Bee-Bot to reinforce concepts includes measuring daily temperature and programming Bee-Bot to follow the rise and fall on a graph which provides a visual demonstration of the changing seasons. Or perhaps they could consider the order of their daily activities and program Bee-Bot to go to cards representing waking up, having breakfast, getting dressed, traveling to school, etc. Older students can bake a cake and use Bee-Bot to follow the steps, reinforcing their understanding of the importance of adding ingredients in the correct sequence. The sequence of letters in their names or words in a sentence, the order of numbers, notes in a piece of music, shops on the High Street, making a snack, getting dressed — the possibilities of sequencing exercises based on students’ lives are endless.
But whatever the theme, Mallory observes that in all sequencing exercises as well as learning about the order of things “by default students have to collaborate, apply estimation, and algorithms to successfully get the Bee-Bot to move to the next stage of a lesson.”
Contact Information
| Name | Mallory Jurkash |
| Position | STEM Innovation Teacher |
| School | Cedar Elementary School |
| Location | Avon Community Schools, Avon, Indiana |
| majurkash@avon-schools.org | |
| Website | https://cedar.avon-schools.org/ |
| Tags | Indiana, Bee-Bot, Coding, Science, STEM/STEAM |
| Age | Grades K–6 |