Good morning, Rob!

Publication date: November 14, 2019

By Marlene, Leading Teacher in Austria

In our school with 350 children, the kids forget more and more to greet each other and the teachers. So we came up with an activity to remind them to greet. For this purpose, one class have built a life-size robot out of cardboards, placed loudspeakers in the top box and equipped the robot with a MicroBit. To make sure that he can really talk and not only give light signals, the Micorbit was programmed with Scratch. The name of our robot is „Rob“.

When the kids shake his hand, he says, “Good morning,” if they press the A-button, he shows “Hello” on the display and if they hit the B-button, he says, “I’m fine, thank you!” So the children learn to ask the question: „How are you?“

 

 

The coding was done by students from the fourth grade ages 9 and 10. It is a very simple code, but we want to add more and more tasks. “Rob” is the prototype, now teachers from other schools come by to rebuild the robot and to see the programming.

 

 

For the next Code Week, it is planned that several schools in the area will produce such a “polite” robot. Many other teachers have the same behavioural problems than we have and they liked the idea. Some of them will not build a robot, they will create a mascot for the school.

 

At our school, it works well, the children are sensitized and greet more frequently.

The programming of Rob should be changed every two weeks, the children have many ideas about what he will say next.