The Great Desert Adventure

• Review the Great Desert Adventure lesson in the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ App.
• If necessary, pre-teach these related vocabulary words: brainstorm, desert, pyramid, imagine, and wonder.
• Consider the abilities and backgrounds of all your students. Differentiate the lesson to make it accessible to everyone. See the Differentiation section below for suggestions.
• If time allows, plan and facilitate the language arts extension. See the Extension section below for more information.

PART A (45 Minutes)

• Facilitate a quick discussion about brainstorming and decision-making.
  • Talk with your students about ways of finding a variety of solutions to solve a problem in your classroom.
  • Ask questions, like: Why should you come up with a lot of ideas when trying to solve a problem? Why should you try different ideas?
• Introduce your students to the team and the challenge: brainstorming how the team will get to the pyramids.
• Distribute a brick set, any additional brainstorming materials, and a device to each group.

• Have your students use the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ App to guide them through their first challenge:
  • Create a way for the team to get to the pyramids. Use at least one motor or sensor (i.e., Color Sensor or Light).
• Your students can use the LEGO bricks supplemented with additional materials to brainstorm. Encourage them to come up with multiple solutions.

• Gather your students together and facilitate a sharing session where they present their initial ideas and provide feedback and suggestions to their peers.

PART B (45 minutes)

• Have your students build, program, and test the prototypes and ideas they came up with during the brainstorming session in Part A of this lesson.
• Remind them to use at least one motor or sensor.
• Encourage them to test and refine their models and programs over 2-3 iterations.
• You can find coding and building support in the Tips section below.

• Ask guiding questions to encourage your students to “think aloud” and explain their thought processes and reasoning in the decisions they've made while building and programming.
• Have your students clean up their workstations.

Observation Checklist

• Measure your students’ proficiency in applying their computational thinking skills to complete the given task.
• Create a scale that matches your needs. For example:
  1. Needs additional support
  2. Can work independently
  3. Can teach others

Self-Assessment

• Have each student choose the brick that they feel best represents their performance.
  • Yellow: I think I can design, build, and program a solution.
  • Blue: I can design, build, and program a solution.
  • Green: I can design, build, and program a solution, and I can help a friend do it too.

Peer-Feedback

• In their small groups, have your students discuss their experiences working together.
• Encourage them to use statements like these:
  • I liked it when you…
  • I'd like to hear more about how you…

Coding Tip

• There are no coding instructions or Inspiration Coding Blocks for this lesson.
  • Encourage your students to experiment and find their own solutions.

Model Tip

• There are no building instructions or Inspiration Images for this lesson.
  • Encourage your students to create their own models.
  • If they need additional guidance, refer them to the building instructions for previous lessons in this unit.
• There's no right or wrong model for this lesson.
  • Your students can create entirely new models, find inspiration in the models from previous lessons, or simply recreate models from earlier lessons.

Simplify this lesson by:

• Reading the Great Desert Adventure story from the
  LEGO® Education SPIKE™ App aloud to your students
• Giving your students the building instructions from previous lessons to use as inspiration for their new way of getting to the pyramids

Increase the difficulty by:

• Using two motors or sensors
• Creating two unique programs, resulting in two different travel experiences using the same model

• Have your students write a story about why the team decided to visit the pyramids, how they got there, and what they saw when they arrived.

If facilitated, this will extend beyond the 90-minute lesson.

Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.1.3