First, you need to play! Play with cubetto and have fun. Think about aspects that will be hard for your child or aspects that were difficult for you. What can you add to the activity that will support this difficulty? For example, my students had a difficult time envisioning a pathway from point A to point B, so when I saw the child struggling, I would use a piece of string to show them a pathway. Then, after a few times of doing this, I was able to take the string away. When they were struggling with understanding left/right, after the robot turned, I made them a compass that they could turn depending on what direction Cubetto was facing. The first book that comes with Cubetto take you through all of the pieces of it, giving you the vocabulary words to use while introducing it to the child. And this book doesn’t need to only be used once, this can be a tool to read several times before moving on to the other books, or kept out while using the other books to remind the children of name of each piece. You could even write down the different pieces names on sentence trips, along with its picture, to keep out while using the other books. While I was playing with Cubetto, I kept a piece of paper by my side and wrote down the steps of using it, as I went through it, so I wouldn’t forget a key piece. I kept these notes in the Cubetto to remind myself and for other teachers who might use the toy in the future, as a cheat sheet. Thinking the process through before you even introduce it to your child is a key step in you and your child’s success.
Secondly, some kids will get this right away and you need to make it harder and harder for them, to challenge them! This is such a great problem to have. For my students who breezed through the accompanying stories, I made up my own and made them more difficult. Then I had the kids make their own maps and challenge other children to make it through their instructions. I would also have these children explain to their peers how they mapped out a pathway. Soon, I could just hand over the box to one of these kids and walk away, knowing that I had turned them into teachers and coders!
Cubetto is coding toy that was donated by a staff member at my school. We got an early version of the toy before it was even on the market! Our Cubetto came with an interface board, directional buttons, a bag for the buttons, Cubetto (the robot), two floor maps and three books to accompany the maps. The first book in troduces all the pieces of the toy and gives the basics of how to use each piece; the other two books accompany each map and tell a story that gives the children directions on how to move Cubetto around the map. The children have to input the directional buttons into the interface board and then press the start button, which then sends Cubetto through the sequence of directions on the map. The children loved experimenting with movement, directions and patterns. As an educator, I would highly recommend some sort of toy that teaches children how to code. I observed a number of benefits to using these toys in the classroom, so much so that I recommended them to all of my friends with children. Some of the key benefits were:
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