Last school year, the Hempfield Foundation awarded a grant to Instructional Technology Specialist Sue Allen to fund the purchase of a Sphero BOLT kit and code mats. The kit consists of programmable robots that can be coded to drive to targets, for story retelling and STEM challenges. These kits were used in both middle schools, as well as the LEC, for different learning activities:

Students in ELA 8 summarized their creative writing, reviewed their parts of speech, and practiced fluency by creating Bolt Runs to visualize the words in their summary.
The middle school tech crews at both LMS and CMS worked through some of the drive activities from the activity cards. In one activity, two students were a team with two solo cups tied together with a Sphero underneath each cup. The students had to drive the Spheros together so that the cups didn’t upset them. This was much harder than it looked!
LEC students collaborated on a math activity card using the soccer pitch mat. Working in teams first the students color coded their Spheros then paired up as opposing teams. Each student had a dice. For each turn the dice were rolled and the difference was a forward roll and a negative was a backward roll. The challenge was to program the Sphero to roll at the correct speed so that it didn’t overshoot the goal and to aim the Sphero each time to make sure it went into the goal.

Ms. Allen shared, “It is incredible to have these resources, including the Spheros sponsored by the Hempfield Foundation, to enable our students to integrate problem solving and computational thinking into subject areas.”