Bringing the real world into the classroom is one of the most important lessons students receive daily in WRSD. In Evergreen Elementary grade four students are learning these real world lessons through the use of robotics. Students involved in the robotics program receive hands on experience solving complex problems that combine reading, writing, mathematics, technology, languages and media all within the grade four classroom.

Evergreen Elementary’s journey towards robotics began last year when grade four teacher Nicole Kotyk and grade six teacher Jordan Bullock applied to attend a week long robotics professional learning opportunity at the University of Calgary. The research based week, funded by Imperial Oil, incorporated hands-on robotics learning as well as opportunities to explore curriculum and cross curricular connections in the elementary classroom. The pair began to understand the benefit to students, but they came back to Evergreen feeling excited and slightly overwhelmed at the prospect of having 30-60 kids building and programming robots.  

Nicole and Jordan began to explore coding and programming opportunities that could help prepare their students to successfully program the robots. As a lead up to working with the robots all WRSD grade four students started learning to code early in the school year. Starting in September 2015, online programs such as Scratch and Hour of Code, as well as technology tools such as Sphero, provided engaging learning opportunities to teach students the fundamentals of programming and coding operations and language. Once the students experienced the success of coding and programming, both teachers saw they would be ready to move into working hands-on with the robots.

A day of learning using these robots is a very unique classroom experience. Students work in teams and often learn through solving various challenges. With the guidance of their teachers, students learn to think critically, identify how to accomplish the problem then innovate together to overcome the problem. Using a mix of hands-on play, imagination and reflection, students gain an entrepreneurial spirit. Bringing together all of these skills in the classroom teaches students global understanding, career and life skills.  

“At the start of the year I kinda knew how to program enough to make degree angles and how to make the robot move,” stated Evergreen Elementary Grade 4 Student, Cash Carter. “Now I’ve learned how to better use programming to link tasks together and do a whole lot more.”   

The Evergreen robotics program has been developed to include all division grade two students.  Grade four, five and six robotics tasks have been developed for each grade and are gradually scaffolded to increase in complexity and expectation. All tasks directly incorporate science and math curriculum objectives and numerous cross curricular competencies. The grade four task has the students creating devices that solve environmental problems and issues.  The grade five task looks at creating devices that could be used in wetland restoration and preservation. The grade six task asks the students to explore mars by building a robotic rover that could efficiently and reliably survey the mars landscape.