Help me teach my son

I home school my son. He’s nine years old.

I just got him a Sparki after he watched with me the Robotics course from the Great Courses. I want him to use it to help him learn robotics.

Problem is I can’t teach him this because I know nothing of the subject myself except what I learned from the Great Courses course, which was very much theoretical and a birds’-eye-view.

So far, I’m having him read the materials online on how to get started.

But I’m trying to figure out how to hold him accountable for his learning and how to set challenges for him to figure out how to do with his new Sparki.

I would be most appreciative if somebody on this board could please help me with this task.

Thank you,

Ari

I think Sparki is a great learning resource :slight_smile:

The tutorials available that your son is looking at are very good quality and explain the more technical parts of programming Sparki to a very high standard.

I would encourage starting from the basics and writing simple programs that use information from one sensor or one set of sensors for example line following and light follow/avoid. Using just one set of sensors will help him get used to the programming language and see how each sensor that he is using works.

You can then build up to more complicated programs, in the same way that the online course materials are laid out on the Sparki website. You can set challenges for your son to encorporate a second sensor in a program that he has already written and to add some sort of decision for the robot to make based on the sensor inputs.

At this point you can then encourage your son to make his coding more complicated by introducing if/else statements, & and or statements, and for loops.

Good luck and keep us updated with your sons progress :slight_smile:

Thank you. That was quite helpful.