BEES IN MOTION

Teachers of Kindergarten Santa Croce in Perugia and POST – Perugia Workshop for Science and Technology

Name: “Bees in motion: children, coding language and nature”

We tried in our kindergarten to introduce a path for the development of computational thinking in children; the premise is to educate children to be active subjects who build, think, test and verify. In fact, making a pigtail means putting children in a position to execute or invent a series of instructions in sequence to reach a goal; in other words, it is building, solving, reasoning … it is developing computational thinking.

The world of nature fascinates children, so we used a robot bee as the protagonist of the coding activity.

At first we presented bees and how their life is structured inside and outside the hive.
We also reasoned about their importance: bees are very precious insects for the ecosystem because, in addition to giving humans many excellent products derived from their work, they contribute to the pollination process. This is why it is important to learn to recognize hives and to protect them. Bees go in search of flowers from which to draw pollen. They are never aggressive towards humans unless they feel threatened. Just move away from the hive and leave the little bees quiet to continue doing their work.
This first moment was very significant as in the 3-6 age group the need for concreteness.

After this brief introduction the educator invited one child at a time to use the robot bee: the child had to guide the bee towards the flower.
it was a very engaging and inclusive activity: each with their own skills was able to move the robot bee.

We also observed that they have indirectly matured and consolidated some basic skills of kindergarten such as orientation in space, laterality, creativity, logical-deductive thinking.