Community reviews for Sphero Edu

This project is a great way for students to dialogue with an archaic text. It's another way to modernize Shakespeare and make it relevant for the students. Students also get the opportunity to "own" Shakespeare's text by directing the robots and performing a Shakespearean production. This option is helpful for students who are shy about speaking and performing in front of audiences. I think that Sphero has great potential as a storytelling tool in various capacities. It offers students an opportunity to "author" or "write" or "perform" stories in a new and inventive way. If your students aren't very familiar with block coding it takes extra work and preparation to be able to use Sphero in the classroom initially, however, once they are familiar with the fundamentals, they can experiment with the coding and movement and be creative.

This tool is not my favorite coding program that I have used. It has moving scales to use instead of being able to type in the numbers of how fast/far you want it to go. This caused great frustration with students. They had to adjust and readjust the speed over and over. There were also many mishaps with which direction the bot turned because it doesn't code left/right. You code the turns with degrees which often resulted in a wrong turn. After a few mistakes, most students were able to figure out that feature.

As a teaching tool, I think Sphero SPRK+ are great--they are easy to use, easy to explain, and easy to problem solve with. However, I am concerned about their durability and longevity for classroom use. I will say that customer service is FANTASTIC. They have helped to troubleshoot issues I've had several times, and replaced all of the malfunctioning robots quickly

The Sphero robot and SPRK app have a lot of promise as a teaching tool in the classroom. It would be difficult to use this to the full potential with only one Sphero robot. I would recommend one robot for every two students.