Sphero Olympics 4 - Mile Run Google Sheets

Doing the Sphero Olympics has allowed us to use a Google Suite for Education App that we don't normally use very often in elementary school. Google Sheets allows us to look at numerical data to compare sets of numbers. For the Sphero Games, we used a spreadsheet to keep track of each group's time for the Mile Run - four times around our 10' by 6' track.

We also talked about conditional formatting - how we can highlight the fastest time (smallest number) in green, the slowest time (largest number) in red, and then have the middle time (median) in yellow.

Finally, we talked about how we could use a formula to find the fastest time and put it in a row by itself at the bottom so we could easily find out who was the fastest in all of 3-6th grade!

Check out our spreadsheet of results below!

   

Sphero Olympics 3 - Programming with SPRK

Hello Families!

The Sphero Olympics is still going in full force in the STEM Classroom. For those of you that might not be aware, we have STEM every other day in the four-day rotation. Our class lasts around 25 minutes long, so we have to use every moment to our advantage.

We are using a Chrome App called SPRK Lightning Lab to program our Sphero Robots. SPRK uses block-based (and text based) programming to control the Spheros. We used block-based programs. We used a block that looped the code over and over again to make the Sphero go around our track four times.

Here's an example of one of the programs:

Each group had to figure out how fast, how long, and in what direction to point their robot. It took a lot of trial and error! We talked about how we can determine which angles to use by thinking about a circle - 360 degrees! We figured out that adding a 'delay' block in between each 'roll' helped the Sphero make better corners. So much great thinking!

Check for the next post to see some of our times for the mile run!