A Teacher’s Thoughts

Today was the final challenge in our Remotely Operated Vehicle Challenge. After about a week of planning and practice the groups from our two classes had their final challenge; navigate to a given location, put a cap on a jar. The simplified assignment from my previous post is:

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.

What worked?

• Code and Texting guidlines. Preset code was limited to 30 characters. This was more than enough. Texts were limited to no more than 10 characters. This seemed to be a good number as well.
• Reflection times. After some guided reflection students were able to work together well to define and propose solutions to the problems they may face. We did this after a trial run so groups had some real experiences.

What were the challenges?

• Cellphone availability. In order for a student to use his/her phone we required a signed permission slip. We did this to ensure students had permission to send text and images and would not incur any additional or unacceptable charges. Turns out that while about half the kids had cellphones, there were very few who had free text and images.
• Attendance. While I would like to think that a motivating activity such as this would keep kids in school each day, there were still numerous absences. Groups quickly realized they needed backup plans for missing people. When the absent student was providing a phone then it was more difficult. Groups lacking phones typically emailed the image and had texts sent via AIM.
• Group planning time. It was difficult for groups to anticipate things they may have to do during the challenge. Most figured that “left, right, straight, and back” would be good enough. In the end what they needed was hands-on experience with their code not working so they could revise.
• TimeThe constant. But really, we are dealing with 43 minute blocks. Our site is a bit of a walk from the other classes so there is about 10 minutes lost to transition. More time would give students a chance to do more reflection right when problems arise. A single class block however, allowed for little more than one or the other.

What would we do differently?

• Scaffold. Students need more practice working with each other. Groups should complete some other low level task before hand that emphasizes communication. This should be an activity without technology, which invariably presents its own challenges. So start simple.
• I would consider not using the phones inside at all, but rather have the mission control students receive the images on email and text back using some form of IM. This would cut the number of needed phones in half.

At the end of the day, the kids thought it was a worthwhile activity but thought there was too much down time waiting for texts or images to go through. I felt the activity presented a good degree of challenge for the students while tying in to a few key standards. This does work nicely as an end of the year activity but would certianly work well at the beginning too. When it comes to the technology involved we were certainly pushing the abilities of our communication devices (unlimited text and messages are currently an upgrade feature on plans) and our own resources (middle school students with phones) here.