Winter Wonderland

With the holidays fast approaching, this blog post is here to help you bring a little festive fun into your KUBO lessons. We will look at easy adaptations you can make to existing KUBO lessons, along with some new ideas. 

Clearing the Snow

The ‘Falling Leaves’ activity can easily be adapted to ‘Clearing the Snow’. This is a great cross-curricular activity that includes Design and Technology as well as Scientific thinking and testing.The students can start by discussing why we might need to clear snow from pathways. It might be worth agreeing on a set route for KUBO, so it is only the shovel design being changed and tested. They will then need to design and construct a shovel. Cotton wool or polystyrene balls can be used for the snow and put on the paths on the printed map. They can then test and modify their shovel. Encourage the students to approach the testing scientifically by only changing one variable at a time and having the same amount (mass) of snow. 

An extension to this activity would be to allow the students to design their own routes with the aim of being the group that clears the path in the fastest time.

Santa’s route

The ‘Trick or Treating’ activity has a couple of different seasonal variations. The idea behind the lesson is to find the shortest route to visit all of the houses on the map. Instead of Trick or Treaters, it could be Santa Claus delivering presents. An extension to this activity could be to add a wait TagTile at each house to give Santa time to pop down the chimney and deliver his gifts! 

An Art and Design element could be added to this lesson by asking the students to design a sleigh costume or Santa suit for KUBO! Another activity could be a “Carol singing KUBO”. KUBO needs to visit each house and ‘wait’ while he sings! Both of these activities can involve Math to calculate how far KUBO has traveled, groups can compare these distances. For older students, a nice extension could be to include some Science and work out the average speed. They need to time how long he takes and measure the distance traveled, speed = distance/time.

Ice skating KUBO

Students work together to build up an ice-skating routine for KUBO, this activity is a great way to incorporate Movement and Music into your KUBO lessons alongside coding! Students are presented with the ice skating arena (a blank map). The students will work in small groups to produce part of the Ice Skating routine. This is a great activity for using KUBO Coding+ to extend the number of movements available.  

These routines will be recorded as a function (each group using a different color to record), then combine the functions to make a longer routine. The students will need to think about how combining individual functions will work together. Will KUBO need to start and finish in the same spot? Will KUBO need to be facing the same direction? This may be a discussion they can have partway through the activity as they encounter problems.

Students could score each others’ routines on complexity, variety of moves, etc. You could even add music, can KUBO move in time to the music?