Caminando letras

With this dynamic, reasoning and orientation work can be carried out in groups while doing some physical movement. In addition to mental exercise, it can be used to introduce the participants to concepts such as programming in a simple way.

Summary table

• Duration: 1h
• Groups: Children, Seniors
• Place: Large room, Exterior
• Theme: Mental exercise, CS Unplugged

Objectives

• Exercise logical reasoning
• Exercise spatial orientation
• Exercise language and communication
• Perform mental exercises through physical movement
• Work on very basic aspects of STEAM

Materials

• Cards with lines of code already proposed

Methodology

• Different groups of maximum three people are created. One person will act as the walker and the others will give the instructions.
• Each group is given a sequence of command combinations. These combinations can be considered a code that allows you to "draw" a letter in digital format by walking. The objective of each team is to be able to guess what letter it is:

• There are only three orders:
  • A: Step up
  • L: Rotate, without moving from the spot, to the left (90 degrees)
  • D: Turn, also without moving from the spot, to the right
  • You can also use other types of commands such as arrows
• The walking person has to translate each order into a movement. With each one, he travels one square within the imaginary board (if the floor has square tiles, they can be used to represent this board).
• You can clarify from which point the sequence is going to start. From there we can only give orders to “advance” and “turn” to one side or the other.

• It is important to consider that the order "advance" means to take a step forward regardless of the orientation of the person walking.

Setting items

The dynamic can be adjusted to the group you work with in many ways. There are two fundamental elements to managing difficulty:

• The type of letter (there are easier and more difficult letters)
• The number of letters to solve
• The orientation (it will cost more to find out which letter it is if we observe the path made from a different point of view from that of the person walking).

On the other hand, if the group responds well to the activity, you can invert the exercise and ask the participants to write the combination of commands starting from a given letter. It can also be done directly: a letter is secretly given to a person in the group, who will have to give the orders without any type of paper support, only mentally.

Conclusions

This dynamic combines a way of doing mental exercises in a holistic way: it requires intellectual and physical work in the same activity. Therefore, it can be a fun and interesting proposal for both older and older people. Although it has many reasoning components, it is a dynamic where orientation can be easily worked on (left and right are not very clear among infant and primary school students, nor is it among some older people).

In addition, it is a kind of programming language (in fact it uses principles of Logo language). With which, we also have a simple way to make an introduction to this world, as well as it allows us to explain how some current machines such as 3D printers work (once the height is established, the extrusion moves position following similar orders to advance so much distance in one direction and in another). The same work is carried out that is carried out with technologies such as BeeBot or ProBot, but changing the robot for a person.

In this sense it is important to see how the dynamics unfold in terms of language and communication. Imprecise or ambiguous orders do not allow finding the solution to the exercise. The walking person somehow has to adopt the role of a robot that does not imply and does not take anything for granted and that is limited to executing the given orders as they are expressed. In this way, you can also work on verbal expression and comprehension.