Teaching Robotics in Elementary - It's Never Too Early!

With programs like ScratchJr, children can now learn how to code before they can read. But they don't even know they are doing it - they just think they're playing! In this session, we'll cover teaching coding and robotics in the early years, how to introduce 7 and 8-year-olds to programmable robots, and why it's so important to develop computational thinking and collaboration skills so early on. Ideas and examples will be given, using a classroom robot with no additional hardware, to show how students can code without reading - all the way to using Python.
We'll also dive into Robotical's Marty the Robot and how I use it in my class to teach basic commands, sequencing, and block-based coding. Marty is great for leveling the playing field and promoting equality - including special education students who code alongside the other students at their level.