Jennifer Kraemer (Early Childhood Education) and I are collaborating on a “Making in ECE” class, which will be one of the capstone/MAtC classes in our maker certificates. As part of that Jennifer has been working with a LEGO MINDSTORMS set, and recently built a little robot.
We sat down the other day to work with the EV3 Programmer app. It reminds me some of Scratch, with a drag-and-drop interface and functional blocks, and we set out to address a classic Logo sort of challenge: have the robot draw/drive a square.
Having never before used the app, and having no prior programming experience, Jennifer was able to program the sequence, complete with looping logic, and topped off by a few embellishments!