Review 1 Citation:
Moore, V. (1999). Robotics: design through geometry. The Technology
Teacher, 59 (3) 17-22.
Quotation:
According to Roger Farr, Professor of Education at
Indiana University, 'Just learning the facts doesn't mean you can apply
them.' Application is part of what he calls 'balanced assessment'
(Checkley, p. 5)." (p. 20).
"Debating the positive and negative societal impacts of our increasing
reliance on robots would be a wonderful follow-up to the students'
individual research..." (p. 19).
Explanation and Comments:
I found this article to be very interesting. Building robots as an
inquiry lesson, as well as using geometry concepts to complete it were
fascinating to me. I immediately thought of my students and how much
they would enjoy constructing their own robots. I have never used
robotics in my classroom, but since I have read this article, I am
wondering how well it would work. I would love to have access to the
program. When children do things like this, they are much more involved
in learning. They are using inquiry based skills to complete a project.
When they actually put something to use and see how it can be applied
in real life, it is made more meaningful. This seems to be a meaningful
lesson. It's one of those that they will remember even when they are
grown because of the impact it had on them. With all the talk about
inquiry based instruction, we need more programs that will let the
children explore and learn things through discovery. My question is the
cost of something as indepth as this. I am curious to look further and
find out how much this would cost and if there would be money available
somewhere for this kind of research. One concern I may have is the time
issue. We are pressure so much to make sure everything is covered, I
don't know if we would really have time to implement something so time
consuming. It is definitely worth looking into.
Hadley McCutcheon BACK