I would have to say that this was a personal best. During the last week, I was able to teach 27 students how to build and program an autonomous robot!
It all went down at Norwalk Community College College for Kids program in the last week of June. I had a morning class made of students ranging in age of 7 to 14. Then I taught an afternoon class of High School kids.
The sheer numbers of students was not the biggest challenge I faced. It was a late order of robot parts from Amazon that really tried my lesson plan. Just about half of my kits were not delivered on time – and I had to scramble to offer value-added info to my high school students. It actually all worked out anyway – I was able to give them a more detailed explanation of common programming constructs (loops, if-then statements, arrays, etc.) . They actually left with more skills to continue building out their bots in the future.
Here’s one of my afternoon students demonstrating his bot …