Today we did something much different than going to our ordinary computer lab! We went to Nes Deh Yoh -an Aboriginal school in Prince George. We had the opportunity to meet Noelle, who works at the Aboriginal District Resource Center. This is actually my second time meeting Noel, I did an internship of 90 hours at Nes Deh Yoh for my major in First Nation Studies. She taught “maker space” with my grade 5/6 class that I was observing and helping at that time. She was patient, kind, and understanding as I observed her 2 years ago. Today, we played around with “ozzobots”. I actually never heard of ozzobots before so I definitely learned something new. We worked in groups of three and each shared the ozzobots. As well, we coded the path for the ozzobot to move on. As I looked around the room, everyone was highly engaged, interested, and working well in their groups. It really shows that hands-on experiences are one of the best ways you can learn. Imagine doing this with kids, it would be so much more fun for them and they would have a blast! It was a day to remember! Thanks Noel for introducing me to the world of ozzobots!
I’d never heard of Ozobots before either! I thought it was such a fun way to introduce coding to kids in a non-scary way. I agree with what you said about it being fun for us adults so I can only imagine how much fun it would be for a group of students. A cool way to take coding further is with Tinkercad or scratch. It was also cool to learn a little bit more about your background with First Nations studies.
Cool beans Gagan, I think that’s great that you had that chance to work with Noelle in Maker Space, you can use that experience for the rest of your career!