LEARNING TO PROGRAM THE ROAMER

As teachers, we all agree that the Roamer from Valiant Technology is a fantastic teaching tool! It can be used to support and enrich work across the curriculum, helping kids develop key skills such as counting, estimating and sequencing. Our more advanced or older pupils can use it to learn about angles and to refine problem solving and thinking skills. They are highly motivating and the kids just love using them right?

In practice however, many of our pupils really struggle when it comes to programming the Roamer. We decided to find out why!

Three major stumbling blocks

1. Many of the children didn't really understand directional language. Most knew forward and back but many got their left and right mixed up.

2. Many of the children were unable to de centre; to see the world from another person's (or object's) perspective. Imagine if you're facing a pupil, your right is their left and their right is your left. To program a Roamer successfully you have to be able to de-centre.

3. The Roamer's hemispherical shape was causing confusion. Which is the front or back of a sphere? Left and right only have meaning if you know which is the front and which is the back. Valiant do provide stickers to decorate the Roamer in an effort to help kids with this, but it just wasn't enough for our pupils.

What we needed was a way of introducing kids to the Roamer that addressed each of these issues. A method that reinforced the use of directional language, that gave kids a more concrete model to explore decentering and to overcome the problem of a hemispherical robot. Oh and because it's Priory Woods, it had to be fun!
Here's what we came up with!

Billy the Robot
We started by looking at the use of directional language. We talked with the kids about robots and how they can only understand simple instructions like forward, back, left, right and stop. We told them that they had had to be careful not to give any other instructions because the robot won't understand them. We needed a robot for them to program so we found a clean bucket and added some eyes and a nose just to make it look silly. Much to the amusement of the kids, the bucket was placed over the head of our classroom assistant and she became Billy the Robot.

The kids then took turns to programme our new robot. Billy only understood the commands forward, back, left, right and stop and it (she) would ignore any other instructions. Whenever a command was spoken, the robot flapped an arm to signal which way it was about to move, giving the children time to change their minds. Using this model, they were able to refine their use of directional language and explore decentering. The kids had a super time sending the robot around the room; collisions were occasional, often deliberately programmed and usually very very funny!

The kids quickly became adept at moving the robot around the room so we added an extra challenge. We placed a 'target' on the carpet (a large red circle cut from sugar paper) and asked them to program the robot to stop on the target. The 'reward' was an extra command, usually 'sing', which made the robot sing a song.

The Fat Controller's Chair
To program a Roamer successfully, you need to able to do more than give it a direction of travel, you also need to tell it how far to travel. We tackled the problem of distance and estimation through the use of the 'Fat Controller's Chair'. We got the kids to program two 4talk4 communication devices; one with the commands forward, back, left and right and the other with the numbers one to four. We used a Big Mack for our 'special command' that could only be used when the robot was on the target.

Once in the 'Fat Controller's Chair', the kids had to choose a direction and then choose a distance (in paces) to move the robot. Left and right was handled by turning 90 degrees for each number. When they had worked out the instruction, they entered the command into the 4talk4s and the robot responded with the appropriate movement. A good tip here is to use pictures of the Roamer's directional arrows to illustrate each cell of the 4talk4, it really helped that the children recognised the arrows when they came to program the Roamer. The robot would only respond to the commands issued by the 4talk4s, giving the kids time to talk about and decide what they wanted the robot to do before entering the command. The children planned and entered their instructions one at a time to move the robot onto the target.

Programming the Roamer for real
We were very lucky when the time came to program the Roamer for real as all of our corridors are covered with tiles, which are exactly the same size as the Roamer (and the bucket). We began by marking out simple paths for the robot to follow i.e. four tiles forward, turn right, then two tiles onto the target. The children modeled the movement of the robot by placing arrows in each of the tiles corresponding to how the robot would move. They then created a program by counting the arrows and putting them into piles representing each instruction i.e. 4 forward arrows means 4 forward. The program was then tested by moving the bucket across the floor following precisely the instructions given.

Finally it was time to program the Roamer for real. We pre-programmed the Roamer to turn 90 degrees for each step to match the movements of Billy and let the kids loose on it. The kids looked at the programmes they had 'written', entered the commands and pressed the GO button. As the Roamer trundled away, the bucket was placed on top so the kids could see how Billy was executing their program. Their programs worked perfectly.

Over the next couple of sessions, we began to withdraw the support of the arrows, getting the kids to count or estimate the number of tiles . The kids easily transferred the skills and quickly learnt how to program the Roamer directly. Poor old Billy was exiled to the caretakers cupboard once again!

We have collected together some of the materials we used to support these lessons; number tiles, arrows and even some eyes and a nose to decorate your bucket into a file, which you can download by clicking HERE.