Students love recess… and students love Robots! Our school doesn’t have a playground right now, and I was struggling to find a way to let students still feel like they have recess. Robots to the rescue!!
It worked so wonderfully with winter coming, and many more days of indoor recess ahead of us, I thought it would be great to share with the VEX community a fun way to give the kids “recess” while indoors.
Using VEX 123s, I set up the board as a 9x9 grid, but attached an extra board below where the robot started. I attached a picture below to make it more clear. I gave students dry erase markers to mark their X or O. Students had to take turns putting the 123 robot on the starting square, and then using the card coder, coding the robot to go to the square they wanted to mark with their X or O. If the code had a bug and the robot didn’t get to the intended square, if the square was blank, they could mark it. If the square was already marked, they lost their turn, it was the other student turn. This turned out to be a great way to make students so invested in getting their code correct to get their robot to the correct square. As games finished up, students were so excited to challenge the winners or play again and try to win this time.
Students loved play this new robotic version of Tic-Tac-Toe! They were motivated to correctly code, engaged and playing together with each other, loved their ‘recess’ time!
I have some other ideas of how to tweak traditional recess games into Robot Recess games, and as I try them out, I’ll share them on here, so keep checking back. Also, if anyone in the VEX community has ideas of recess games that could be modified to be played with VEX, whether it’s the 123s, GO, or IQ, share them here! Let’s get all these great ideas out!
