Make a Turkey with Google Draw
We've been exploring Google Draw in preparation for creating characters for our upcoming Choose Your Own Adventure books. Previously, students had to practice completing a Google Classroom assignment by drawing a self-portrait using Scribble on Google Draw, but that's been their only prior experience with the program.
Luckily, it turns out a turkey is easy to make out of different shapes! I forbade them from using Scribble - they could only create their turkeys using shapes. And they. Were. AMAZING! I led them through creating a circle for the body and an elongated circle for a feather, as well as a reminder on how to copy and paste to quickly create a lot of feathers, and the kids ran with it. Check out these A-MAZ-ING turkeys!
Thanksgiving Storybook STEM: How to Catch a Turkey with Ozobots!
Our storybook STEM activity this month was all about Ozobots and turkeys!
We started by reading the majority of the silly rhythmic How to Catch a Turkey by Adam Wallace and Andy Elkerton. It's narrated by a stage-shy turkey who's about to be forced to star in the Thanksgiving pageant. To avoid the stage, he runs through the whole school - the science classroom, cafeteria, playground, hallway, and on and on. We stopped after he ran through the hallway and introduced our problem: Let's catch this turkey!
I had set up each table with a white sheet of paper that had all the different scenes from the book taped on in the order the turkey visited them. The kids' task was to guide an Ozobot through all the sites, in hopes of catching that turkey!
If you haven't used an Ozobot before, there are two main ways to program them: You can use their line-following functionality, or write a program using a Blocks-type code on the OzoBlockly app or website.
The line-following functionality is great, and offers a more "unplugged" version of coding, because the code is really just sequences of colors and lines. Ozobots will follow any line, and will do certain tricks and moves if it sees certain colors. If this is your students' first time using Ozobots, I would recommend starting with this!
This was not my fourth graders' first time with Ozobots, though, so I had them using Blockly! I wanted them to get a tiny introduction to Blocks, and this was perfect. They did get a little frustrated because they had to wait a while between each tweak of their program to re-send the program to the bot, but the looks on their faces says it all! They did a great job!
If I were to do this again, the biggest edit I would probably make would be to cut out some of the rooms the turkey ran through. None of the groups were able to catch him by getting through the whole story!
After we worked for a while getting to as many rooms as we could, we reconvened to find out whether they did, in fact, catch the turkey, or how their problem was solved. You'll have to read it and find out! :)
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