HOLLIS – We’re the kids in Room 110 at Hollis Primary School, and we want to tell you about coding, programming and robots in our classroom.

We started coding by going to a website called code.org and began with “Light Bot,” which teaches coding basics, procedure and loops using pictures. When we got really good at coding ourselves, we taught the first-graders in Mrs. Van Sciver’s class.

The Hollis Parent/Teacher Association was nice enough to buy our school Lego WeDo kits to begin learning how to build and program simple robots.

Starting with a monkey that beats drums, we began creating Lego models and programmed them to do different things. Using motors, gears and sensors, we can program to them move. We also can program them to make different noises like bird chirps, a crashing trash can, a person snoring and a frog. We could choose different numbers from 1-20 for different sounds. We also taught Mrs. Van Sciver’s class how to do this.

The Hollis Brookline High School FIRST Robotics Team 1073 came to our classroom to teach us about robotics. They brought in a 120-pound robot named Atlas.

They type a code into the computer, and the computer translates it into a language that the robot understands. That’s how they got it to pick up and throw a big medicine ball for the FIRST Robotics competition. We really connected to this because we’ve been programming, too.

Some students in our classroom have also been working on Scratch and Khan Academy to get better at coding and programming skills. Everybody in our classes – teachers included – think this experience has been awesome!

– Submitted by Hollis Primary School