Students at Madison Elementary School program Bee-Bots.

By DANI BARKEY
Chief Accountability Officer,

Warsaw Community Schools

The Madison Elementary School primary grades are piloting an exciting new robotics program. Kindergarten teacher Gina Courtois is leading a group of kindergarten, first and second grade teachers to implement deeper thinking with the practice of programming robotics. In particular they are using robots geared toward use with the younger students. These robots are called Bee-Bots.

A Bee-Bot is a new robot designed to teach sequencing, estimation, and problem solving. It can also be used for number and letter recognition and team building. The students can program the Bee-Bot with 1-40 simple commands of forward, back, right or left.

The students enjoy working with the Bee-Bots and are inspired to think at a deeper and deeper level as they enthusiastically try to control the direction of it with more and more commands.

The Bee-Bots were purchased with combined funding from a STEM grant, Apple Grant, and Warsaw Community Schools equipment funding. Madison currently has enough Bee-Bots for a classroom set with one Bee-Bot for every two students.

The older students at Madison have an opportunity to work with Lego Robotics by participating in a robotics club for fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. This is the second year that robotics has been offered as a club.

In the first year of implementation, sixty students were equipped with the knowledge of engineering, programming, and the final production of a robot that responds to highly calculated commands.

WCS teachers, Terry Sims, Kevin Lancaster, Kris Huber and Nicole Brandt coached the robotics club.

Madison is also experimenting with another robot that provides a link between Bee-Bots and the Legos. It is called a We-Do.

According to Chief Academic Officer David Robertson, “The robotics program at Madison Elementary School gives students the opportunity to apply their learning in a tangible manner. It provides them the hands-on experiences that enrich learning.”