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Includes statements from Development Matters (birth to age five) and the relevant ELGs in full, for the We are robots adult led activity
Early Learning Goal links
- Mathematics ELG: Number
- Mathematics ELG: Numerical Patterns
- Understanding the World ELG: Past and Present
- Understanding the World ELG: People, Culture and Communities
- Expressive Arts and Design ELG: Creating with Materials
Characteristics of effective learning
Play, Be, C Units provide enabling environments with teaching and support from adults. Reflecting on the characteristics of effective teaching and learning, children will have opportunity to learn and develop by:
- Playing and exploring – children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’.
- Active learning – children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties and enjoy achievements.
- Creating and thinking critically – children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things.
Early Years Foundation Stage Statutory Framework: accessed November 2024. Available under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
What you will need
- Robot photographs
- A large space to move around while following instructions
- Arrows (forwards, backwards, left and right) – you can draw them, print them out or display them on a smart board
- The robotics engineer poster
Duration
- 10 minutes or so
STEM vocabulary to introduce
Robot, robotics, machine, mechanical, programme, language, directions, commands, algorithms, forwards, backwards, left, right, up, down, turn, under, over
Before you start
Draw, print out or display the arrows on your smart board.
Show the children the robotics engineer poster and tell the children that they are going to be robotics engineers for this activity.
Ask the children if they know what a robotics engineer does. Robotics engineers design, build and programme machines to do jobs more easily than a human could. These might be jobs that are repetitive, very dangerous, difficult or in very tiny spaces. This could be in factories, in medicine or even in space.
Robotics engineers are:
Creative – to design and build robots for different jobs.
Observant – they need to find and fix faults in robots and computer code.
Resilient – they need to try lots of different ways to design, build and programme robots before they get them to work properly.
In this activity the children will be observant like robotics engineers, looking carefully at the arrows and moving in the correct direction. They need to be resilient as it might take them a while to learn which way they need to go when they see an arrow.
What to do – step 1
Ask the children if they know what a robot is. They may tell you a character in a film or from a television programme. Show the children pictures of different robots and tell them that a robot is a machine that does a job to help people.
We can give robots instructions, just like our adults tell us to wash our hands, line up or tidy up. The instructions we give to robots are called algorithms.
We can’t speak to most robots in our language, we have to speak to them using a computer and use a special language called code.
Explain to the children that code is made from words and numbers or symbols and we are going to use a code made from arrows.
Tell the children that to begin with, they are going to be the robots, and you are going to be the robotics engineer, programming them.
Step 2
Show the children the forwards arrow. Tell them that when they see this arrow they can take one step forwards only! You might want to get the children to move mechanically, like robots.
Show the children the backwards arrow and ask them to take one step backwards only. Remember, robots can only do exactly what humans tell them to, so no extra steps!
Show the children the right arrow (red for right!) and ask them to take one step to the right. They may need some pointing and prompting to help.
Show the children the left arrow, and ask them to follow the arrow and take one step to the left.
Step 3
Show the children the different arrows until they can follow them confidently.
When the children are ready, begin to use two arrows together- for example, two steps forward, three steps to the right. This will of course depend on how confident your children are at counting and the amount of floor space you have available.
You could tell the children that when we give computers an instruction using code, we call it an algorithm.
Step 4
Tell the children that you are going to give them an algorithm or instructions that will make them draw a shape on the floor with their feet.
This algorithm will create a square. Can any of the children tell you the shape?
This algorithm will make a rectangle. Could anybody guess the shape correctly this time?
Step 5
Ask different children to come to the front to be the robotics engineer and programme the other robots in the classroom using the arrows.
Remember to refer to the children as robotics engineers and praise them for using the attributes. You could say things like:
“You were observant like a robotics engineer and looked carefully at the arrows to see which direction to move in…”
Other things to try
You could make up your own symbols for the code, such as turn left, turn right, go under, go over, move your arms, move your legs and so on.
The science of robotics engineering
We have put together some useful information about the science of robotics engineering to accompany this activity. Don’t worry, this is for your information only and to help you answer any questions children may have. We don’t expect you to explain this to the children in your setting!
What is the difference between a machine and a robot?
Both machines and robots can be programmed by computers, but robots also have sensors and can react to their environment.
What is the difference between code and an algorithm?
An algorithm is the set of instructions you follow in order to complete a task, and coding is giving this algorithm to a computer in a language it understands. In this activity, the algorithm was to move the robot to the target without hitting any of the obstacles and the code was the arrow symbols.
What is computer programming?
Programming is writing computer code to implement algorithms. This is written in an artificial language that a computer understands. There are lots of different languages, some more complicated than others. Ones you might have heard of are Python, Java, C++, BASIC or Scratch.
Which language does a computer understand?
Computers use machine or binary code which uses only two numbers: 0 (off) and 1 (on). Programming languages such as Python or Java are designed to be easy for humans to understand and write in but most computers cannot run programs in these languages. They need to be translated into machine code for computers to be able to execute programs.
