National Science Week Focus: Space Science with Ozobots

This week is National Science Week in Australia and to celebrate I am sharing a blog posts dedicated to how I have used popular technology tools to enrich science learning. In today's post, I share a series of lessons exploring how popular robots, Ozobots, were used to explore the moon's orbit around Earth and how eclipses occur. Read on to learn more...

Lately I have been interested in finding ways technology tools can connect with and enhance classroom curriculum. With an increasingly crowded national curriculum, developing rich learning experiences that address several objectives at once is a way classroom teachers can work smarter. Utilising engaging technology tools and layering up skills and knowledge produce highly effective learning experiences for students. A recent mini unit with Year 3 students made use of Ozobots, a tool that I have historically reserved for teaching coding. I cannot take credit for this concept at all. The lessons were based on educator resources found on the Ozobot website. I highly recommend you check them out. As teachers, we do not always have to reinvent the wheel (as the saying goes), but it is always good to innovate on it and adapt it to your context....and that is what I did. 

In the end, a very small unit of a couple of lessons had a big impact on students. The video below was a culminating project of sorts.

Connecting with Classroom Content

Year 3 students were learning about how the rotation of the earth causes day and night in the classroom. I wanted to build on that and demonstrate how the moon can occasionally interrupt this cycle through an eclipse event. 

Source: ACARA

Lesson Progression

Lesson 1: Learning to use Ozobot Colour Codes

Students had never used the Ozobots before, so I felt a lesson getting them familiar with the robots was necessary. The Basic Training lessons have plenty of good ideas for introducing students to the robots. Students learnt the features of the robot, how to calibrate it and use colour codes to control it. Identifying how similar robots are used in the real world was an especially nice connection to make and helped students relate to the independent problem solving tasks in the lesson where they had to get Ozobot to the shop and then have him deliver goods to a certain part of a warehouse.

Lesson 2: Exploring Lunar and Solar Eclipses

The Celestial Mechanics lesson on the Ozobot website provided the resources and inspiration for the lesson. We blacked out the track for the "moon" and programmed the earth to spin on the spot using the suggested code. We used torch light as the rays of the sun which created a shadow, beautifully simulating how eclipses occur. Students were also able to identify the difference between solar and lunar eclipses from this activity. They captured video of the model for later use.

Lesson 3: Learning about gravity and orbital momentum using Ozocodes

Teaching Year 3 students about angular momentum seems to be pitching a little high, but students understood it easily with our second task. We actually spun a student on a chair in the classroom, getting them hold their arms close and further away, illustrating how the speed of the spin changed. This kind of exercise was very relatable to students and from this we were able to simplify that the moon moves faster in its orbit when it is closer to Earth and slows down as it moves further away. Students then used basic Ozocodes to program the moon's elliptical orbit to represent this. An example is shared below.

Lesson 4: Sharing our Learning

The evidence spoke for itself when it came time to share our learning. It was clear that the experience had stuck with students and the understandings they had developed were meaningful. Students used digital inking in the Photos app on Windows 10 devices to annotate onto the videos they had previously captured. Several went further and added post production elements like sound and titles. The final step was to add their video to their Digital Technologies Portfolio on the Class Dojo Student Story. Parents were impressed and responded with lovely comments. 

Final Thoughts

This series of lessons turned into a really successful learning experience, which has a lot of potential to be expanded upon or applied to other celestial events. Learning went beyond meeting Science objectives, covering coding and elements from the General Capabilities.

You can check out the collection of lessons for Ozobots here. I highly recommend them!

If you have Ozobots in your classroom, I'd love to hear about how you have used them. Please leave a comment below!