Bonny Kate Students
Merge Art And Robotics

Bonny Kate Elementary 5th-grader Emma-Lee Swaggerty paints a canvas using a “Sphero” robot.

The results may have resembled Jackson Pollock more than Piet Mondrian, but for students at Bonny Kate Elementary a recent project taught them about art and robotics.

On Wednesday, Bonny Kate students went outside to paint posters they had created in art class. The twist? The painting was done with a fleet of “Spheros,” spherical robots with gyroscopes and accelerometers that are controlled by tablet computers.

Created by librarian Robin Anderson and art teacher Jacqueline Fowler, the project aimed to spark a love of programming, even among young students.

The spheros are part of the KCS STEM Department Technology checkout system and are available to all schools in the district. Anderson said that while the 5th-graders weren’t ready for the higher-order math of programming, letting them drive the robots was a good first step.

“The future’s going to be robotics and I’m just hoping to ignite some passion … I keep telling them, you’re my future, you can change the world,” Anderson said. “You might be able to solve one of those problems that we don’t even know is a problem yet.”

As part of the project, students looked at artwork from Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter known for precise, geometric shapes, and Jackson Pollock, the action painter famous for splattering paint on giant canvases.

After drawing geometric shapes on posters, they dipped the Spheros in bins of paint, placed them on the canvases and used the tablet computers to steer them around the surface.

The process posed challenges on a number of levels, beginning with the students’ realization that after holding a paint-soaked Sphero, they needed to clean their hands before handling the tablets.

But once they started painting, it was clear that students were intrigued by the process, and enjoyed the chance to create art in a different way.

While many students produced paintings that were Pollock-like and chaotic, Carson Vandergriff was careful to stay within the lines while steering a Sphero over a cube shape.

Asked about his technique, Vandergriff said it was “just a hope for the best”, as he tried to make the Sphero do what he instructed.

Anderson -- who is retiring at the end of this year -- is herself a programmer, an interest she picked up as part of a foreign language requirement during college. She said former students will sometimes come back to tell her about the programming work they’ve done in middle school, and she hopes some of them will go on to even more advanced work.

But even if they don’t, the painting project was designed to be fun, since the 5th-graders will soon be moving on. “This is their last time, so I wanted them to enjoy doing this,” she said.