10+ Winter WONDER-ful Activities for Dash & Dot

It’s Time for a Holiday Bash!

There are many ways to reinforce physical coding and applied robotics during the holiday season. You can use these winter wonderland ideas as morning warm-ups, for Friday free time, or you can create rotation stations to tackle them all at once during a classroom celebration.

With some simple colored beads and a pipe cleaner, you can introduce the binary alphabet! Have students code their names or a winter-related spelling word. Use this ASCII Binary Alphabet PDF to get started. Then loop the pipe cleaner to make an ornament or bend it to form a candy cane!

Creative idea and photo from Little Bins for Little Hands.

Create a holiday tree shape or a dreidel shape on the floor with masking tape. Ask students to use Go, Path, Blockly, or Wonder to move Dash along the tree or dreidel’s outline.

Outline a tree using a square and triangle or create a dreidel using a pentagon.

Bring on the carols! Music is a natural way to teach coding. Program Dash to play a holiday song using Xylo and the xylophone. Try a simple version of “Jingle Bells” (here’s another video example). Think of moves and spins that might accompany the tunes. Remember, you can sync up five Dash robots to one device to create a marching band! And we hadn’t heard of this holiday robot song before!

Snow patrol time! Have Dash use the Bulldozer attachment to push piles of cotton balls (check out the video instructions). Students can build their own attachment with simple DIY materials too.

Fun activity from the Digital Scoop!

Clever idea from the blog, Engage Their Minds

Hold a holiday pageant (see video), where participants need to dress up in their best winter outfits and answer pageant questions. Ask students to first program their robots with one noun response, an -ing verb response, and a location response. Then surprise the contestants with questions like:

• What is your favorite piece of winter attire?
• Which winter sport do you excel at?
• Where would you like to travel once spring comes?

And who doesn’t like a yummy snack? Riff off of this clever robot snack by using milk bottles to make a snowman, a red Hershey’s kiss as a Santa’s hat, or pretzels as reindeer antlers!

Then watch this holiday episode of the Dot & Dash Show.

What other holiday ideas can you come up with?

• Can you create your own version of the poem, The Night Before Christmas? See this creative programmer’s twist. Have Dash or Dot recite your original poem about coding and robots in an A, B, C, B rhyme scheme.
• Can Dash use the launcher to help Santa deliver gifts down a chimney (think tall box!)? Or maybe Dash’s launchers can be used for an epic snowball fight?
• Can Dash turn into Rudolph and tow a sleigh containing Dot?
• Can Dot or Dash tell the story of Hanukkah candles, complete with recordings and blinking eye patterns?
• Can you wrap Dash in a dreidel outfit and let it spin?
• What mischief can Dash and Elf on a Shelf get into? https://twitter.com/Roosloan/status/806126796441845760

Share your winter WONDER-land ideas with us and tag us @WonderWorkshop. Happy Holidays to All!