After dinner each night, campers can pick a counselor-led activity. On Monday night, several students enjoyed working with Sphero BOLTs—a programmable, robotic ball that teaches coding. There were ten different mazes or challenges that campers had the task of completing. Their robots were charged with going through furniture, avoiding little people on the maze, and even going down a flight of stairs to complete the tasks. Head Counselor Evie Ellis led the activity and was thrilled with the outcome. “I am a computer science major and spent time last semester working with students in the Technic platform,” said Ellis. “I love inspiring children to pursue coding.”
When asked what the most challenging maze was, Kap felt the maze with all the wooden people in it was the hardest to get the robots through and the easiest was a simple path to a trash can. Students could use arrows to move the robots; however, the block code was the more complicated method that most of them used. Maddox thought the maze going under the chair was easiest while Ben and Emerson were inclined to agree with Kap that the maze with the wooden obstacles was quite hard to get through without hitting the little people.
As Sphero BOLTS rolled across the floor, under chairs, through cabinets, and down the stairs, we could see how fun the power of programming is for these future scientists and technology experts.
