Eighth-grade accelerated math students got their driver’s licenses this week! You won’t see them out on the open road, though. You’ll find them navigating rovers around the Middle School’s Messing Library using their Texas Instruments TI-Nspire™ graphing calculators.
Middle School Math Teacher Dr. Jody Marberry used this first project with the rovers to introduce students to the idea of programming, which goes far beyond actual programming. « They learn to use a library of Python commands, understand that syntax is important, and that programming requires simply trying things out, over and over, until they find success, » she explained.
The students set to work by tackling basic challenges first, such as getting their rovers to move and determining how far a unit is. Then Dr. Marberry increased the difficulty of the challenges: could they park their rover close to plastic dinosaurs without hitting them or program their rovers to navigate through a determined path? Students even pulled white boards off the walls and attached markers to their rovers, programming the rovers to draw geometric shapes like equilateral triangles and pentagons.
« In the real world, problems rarely come with sets of directions, » Dr. Marberry said. « We’re teaching students the idea of exploring and creating, testing and iterating. It’s a huge part of mathematics, and this can be challenging for those students for whom math usually comes easy. We’re helping them become comfortable sitting in the unknown. »
« Thinking is what you do when you don’t know what to do. »
Programming a rover to draw an equilateral triangle can be harder than it first appears. Every angle inside an equilateral triangle is 60 degrees, so students may at first assume that’s the only angle they need to work with. However, they soon learn that they need to look at the triangle from the perspective of the rover itself—which includes considering external angles—at each particular moment of the programming.
Dr. Marberry’s ultimate goal for this initial rover activity is for students to not only get used to feeling uncomfortable, to get used to failing and trying again, but to also have fun while doing it. « It’s a chance for the kids to have a blast, » she said. « Normally, when you have a class of accelerated students, they get upset when they struggle. With this project, though, they’re having so much fun. It’s an hour of struggle and laughter. »