The customer is always right.

My fourth grade class on Friday finished presenting their PowerPoint presentations with about 15 minutes left so we decided to brainstorm some ideas of what they want to learn about. I realized that there is not much time left in the school year and I wanted to give them a chance to tell me what they want to learn about before they go to the middle school. They had some amusing ideas :

1. How to build a robot and program a robot to function.
2. Lasers – how to make one, how they work
3. Internet – how to explore freely
4. How to make/build a website and publish
5. E-mail, how to create a personal account.
6. Jet Packs – how they work, how to create
7. Flying Cars – will they work, should they work and how to make one.
8. How to create your own computer games
9. How to create a virtual football (sports) player. Create a team
uniform and players.
10. Create your own television and videos

I told them that I would use the list to try and find some new activities for us to do before school ends but that I do not think we would be able to cover all of them. Robots and Jet Packs caught my eye. I found a website that will let the students build 'bots' and program them in a game. There are puzzles that they have to complete that introduces them to programming. It has a drag and drop interface that lends itself to kids learning the basics behind giving computers and robots instructions. I am leaning towards breaking my classroom into centers where there will be a different activity about robots or programming. I want to have four stations and I would one of the stations to be a chance for the students to actually create some sort of robot. I am getting ahead of myself, I sometimes wonder who is more excited about the activities we do in class, me or the kids. I am looking for ideas of any sort of kits that I could use that won't cost me my paycheck. The kids enjoy using the computers but I know that we are all longing for some hands on activities. I found that LEGO has some cool robot kits but they get expensive fast. I don't think it is going to be feasible to let every kid build their own robot but the LEGO kit would allow me to work with small groups to create robots to complete a task.

The jet packs idea caught my eye next, no... I am not going to be building jet packs and strapping students to them for testing...not till I am tenured anyway :-) What I was thinking we could do is create water bottle rockets and collect data about how well they fly, how long, how high and record this information along with taking some pictures and video and create a presentation to share with the other grades. I am thinking about letting them work in teams to choose a design and build a rocket from cardboard fins and soda bottles. I built a launcher 3 years ago when I was working at a day care and it worked pretty well, the kids loved it. The best part about bottle rockets is that if I have them work in teams it will be much easier on my wallet. I am thinking about having lotteries for each team to see who would get to take the rocket home or just tell them that no one can keep their rockets. I have a lot to think about and very little time to waste. If anyone out there has any experience with classroom robotics and bottle rockets I would love any tips or suggestions.