On Monday the 23rd of January, during the digital technologies lesson we made grids related to themes and made links to the Curriculum for Excellence experiences and outcomes across all levels within primary schools. We chose the theme of beaches as we thought it was a good idea because it’s a happy theme and everybody loves going on holiday. Our success criteria during this lesson were to use Bee-Bot to teach skills across many curriculum areas, such as literacy and numeracy. From this task we were successful using Bee-Bot as an example of a programmable toy to come up with various learning approaches that could be adapted into a lesson when we become primary teachers.
Use of programmable toys such as Bee-Bot within the classroom is extremely important as it gives the children the chance to be in charge of the Bee-Bot. There are also many benefits in including the use of programmable toys within classroom lessons because this can result in the expansion of children’s problem-solving skills and it would provide children with an insight into important cross-curricular links. Pekarova Janka emphasises the importance of programmable toys in the classroom by stating “The curriculum introduces programmable toys as a good example for developing knowledge and understanding of the contemporary world.”
Our beach theme was very fun to work with and we enjoyed being creative and imaginative to adapt the use of programmable toys into possible numeracy lessons. We were successful in this by completing a grid which could provide many different learning approaches for children. Here is a picture of our beach themed grid below –
