The educator had a great time building a Fun Bot robot and found the experience very engaging. They were surprised at how easy it was to program the robot using the Hummingbird software. The educator learned that it is better to test functionality before aesthetics, as they would have caught an issue with a motor if they had tested it earlier. As a result of this positive experience, the educator plans to incorporate robotics into future lesson plans and believes students would find similar activities highly effective.

1. Fun Bot Reflection
Looking back on the Fun Bot activity I can confidently say that I have learned two things. The
first one being that I am actually capable of building a robot that actually functions as it should,
and the second being how engaged I was with an activity like this as an educator. I cannot
imagine how effective something like this could potentially be to a classroom of any age. I mean
it when I say that I had a great time with this activity and even found myself just sitting at home
wondering about what it was that I could add to my bot the next day that could enhance it even
more. With that being said, I have learned a lot about basic robotics from this activity in that
until this, I had never had any experience with robotics but found it very easy to catch onto.
While programming sounds intimidating just to say, the Hummingbird software made
programming our Marco Bot simple. The program was very direct which made it easy to
program anything we would want Marco to do. From this practice run I have also realized that
it is probably better to ensure that a bot functions the way you want it to prior to making it look
pretty and appealing. This was the case with Marco’s pom-poms which used a 360 motor that
caused the wires to twist. If I had tested the motor prior to assembling it to the arm I had
caught this flaw earlier and instead used a 180 degree servo instead. With that being said I
believe that I can take what was learned from this practice activity and apply it to the bot in my
unit plan. I also foresee the implementation of robotics into my lesson plans as a result of this.