A Teacher’s Thoughts

The phone rings. It is a picture from the athletic fields behind the school. Kids quickly look at the image, then refer to a desktop displaying an aerial view of the same location using Google Earth. After conferring for a few minutes a student texts PU TW SP. Shortly after a blindfolded student picks up a jar from a bucket on the edge of a field, twists and removes the lid. What??

Working with another 8th grade science class our students are attempting to model the types of communication barriers that occur when dealing with remotely operated vehicles. I got the idea from somewhere, (I wish I could remember, Jason Project maybe?). We added in cellphones and Google Earth to add technology to the challenge. And a challenge it is. Student groups are broken in two, half inside and half in a field well out of view. Student Robots are placed in the center of the field and must simply follow commands, sent as coded text messages. After executing a command, the student simply snaps a picture and sends it back. While inside, the team can rely only on the image sent to them and the images in Google Earth. The goal is to navigate to an assigned location and perform a task.

We have only just started; the kids are in the planning phases. While the opportunity to use their phones definitely has their interest levels up, the need for focused practice in communication skills is apparent. Its funny but to the kids, cell phones are so common to them that they assume this will be easy. Those groups who have begun testing out their strategies have found just the opposite. Watching them regroup and reorganize has been satisfying. I will try to post more on this project as we fine tune the implementation.