New Coding Skills Allow Furnace Woods Students to Make Their Own Parade

A couple days after the holiday passed, Furnace Woods Elementary School students were using new skills to imitate what they had watched Thanksgiving morning.

Second graders in Rachel Naraine’s STEAM class reproduced their version of the iconic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by creating floats and a parade route. To create the floats, they cut, colored and decorated animals or imaginary creatures. Those designs were placed on top of Ozobots, which are little robots that move from one location to another using color combinations.

The Ozobots, which were introduced to the students for this project, provide an introduction to coding. The students had to code the Ozobots to stop and turn along the parade route.

“It’s an introduction to let them learn how to code and how to use the Ozobots,” Naraine said. “This allows us to connect it to something they’ve seen in real life.”

Earlier this week, Naraine played video footage of the Macy’s parade while students completed the project. They used bears, cats, dogs, chickens, elephants, foxes, turkeys, unicorns and more for the floats. The students were able to add ears, eyes and eyes as well.

The parade routes were designed for them, or they could create their own routes. However, in either case, they were promoted to code seven different stops or turns along the route for the Ozobots to follow.

“This was their first time using Ozobots in second grade,” Naraine said. “They will learn a lot more about coding in our class throughout the year.”