At SchoolSphero Team
A boy works on a math activity with a Sphero BOLT robot in school.

This back-to-school season, educators are looking for ways to help students rediscover their love for learning. There’s no better way to get students excited than hands-on, collaborative, and fun activities for core subjects you’re already teaching—like math! According to CES, math teaches logical and critical thinking, life skills, and supports continuing education and careers. Despite math being such an important subject, it has a reputation for being abstract, difficult, and mundane. We believe it’s time to retire that stereotype and make math exciting. Reboot your math class with engaging and fun activities that even the most math-adverse students will enjoy. 

In this blog, we’ll share 10 of our favorite math activities using Sphero robots for elementary, middle, and high school to help you re-boot back to school!

Math Activities for Elementary

For young learners with a lot of energy, having interactive lessons is vital to ensure a productive learning environment. Having fun and exciting lessons also inspires a love for learning that lasts throughout students’ academic careers. These activities are designed to teach elementary students basic math concepts in an engaging way. Elementary students work on a math activity with Sphero indi.

  1. Shapes, Shapes, Shapes (Grades K–2): This activity is designed to help younger students (K-2) identify and describe basic geometric shapes and colors while learning about moving an object in space.
  2. Bowling for Fractions (Grade 3): Go bowling with Sphero to determine fractions, identify the largest fractions and create equivalent fractions from the number of pins knocked down.
  3. Area of a Rectangle (Grades 3–5): In this activity, students explore the area of a rectangle. Use the sensor data in the Draw canvas to calculate the area of a rectangle in various unit measures. Discover how the calculation of area is used in real-life situations.
  4. Skip Counting with Sphero (Grades 3–5): Learners will work in a group to practice repeated addition/multiplication while also driving or block coding with their Sphero.

Find more math activities for elementary school students: Sphero & littleBits

Math Activities for Middle School

As math concepts get more advanced, it is important to present them in an easily digestible way. Adding fun to the classroom makes students want to learn, and can help them pick up difficult concepts without even realizing how much they’re learning. 

Two middle school students work on a math activity with their Sphero BOLT robots.

  1. Fortune Teller (Grades 4-8): Turn your Sphero BOLT into a Fortune Telling Magic 8-Ball that predicts the future by combining a variable, nested If/Then, Else conditions, and random values. By creating a random data generator, we can investigate chance processes and evaluate probability models.
  2. Geometric Transformations (Grades 6-8): Learners use the Draw canvas and Sphero robot to create geometric transformations, specifically rotations, reflections, and translations of a shape.
  3. MMMR with Sphero (Grades 3-8): Get hands-on with statistics! Students code their Sphero robot to collect a data set and calculate the mean, median, mode, and range.

Find more math activities for middle school students: Sphero & littleBits

Math Activities for High School

Even older students should have fun while learning. Adding robots into the classroom is an exciting change from the day-to-day of classes. Plus, creative activities can reach students who may not understand concepts when taught traditionally.

Three high school students work on a math activity with Sphero RVR robots.

  1. Math Darts (Grades 6-12): Darts is a common game found all around the world. But did you know that the dartboard is highly mathematical? In this activity, you will program your Sphero robot to participate in a game of Darts...with a mathematical twist! 
  2. Fun Fun Functions (Grades 7-12): In this activity, students will use Sphero robots to build a calculator. In this process, they will learn how to create and invoke functions.
  3. SOH CAH TOA Spheros (Grades 9-12): Bring triangles to life as your students use Sphero robots to use right triangle trigonometry to solve triangles for their Sphero robot to trace.

Find more math activities for high school students: Sphero & littleBits 

 

Sphero robots can be used to teach all levels of math, from beginning shapes to advanced functions. PK-2nd grade students can use indi, our newest robot for our youngest learners. Other students can start with Sphero BOLT. BOLT is suitable for both beginner to advanced coders with Draw, Block, and JavaScript programming options. More advanced learners can use Sphero RVR to learn Javascript and hacking with our public SDK. There are endless possibilities of how Sphero robots can be used to help teach math in the classroom.

 

Visit the Sphero Edu App or littleBits Classroom for more ideas.

At school