Rocky Point Middle School eighth graders are taking skills they learned last year in Robotics I and applying them to Robotics II with teachers Victoria Fabrizio and Ryan Heinzman. 

During a recent lesson with Ms. Fabrizio, students were focused on coding and computational thinking with an advertising challenge that she introduced. The 16 students in the class used the LEGO SPIKE Prime curriculum and engaged in a structured sequence of programming activities in a real-world, project-based context. 

Ms. Fabrizio instructed the students to pick a company and a product to promote. They were tasked with choosing a theme song, and with coding their robot to display a message sign, an animation and beeps. Ms. Fabrizio checked out each successful project with an advertising quiz rubric. 

This is just one of the curriculum projects designed to motivate students to think about the patterns and structure of not just robotics, but also programming and problem-solving in more general terms. The curriculum also includes videos, animations and lessons to aid in fostering computational thinking using the SPIKE hardware and programming app.