Paving the Way with Treads

Third grade appears in both True Robotics programs on purpose, so your school can match our robot to your students. Paving the Way with Treads suits third graders who are new to robotics, because its coding is simpler to pick up. Taking Off with Pilot suits third graders who are mechanically inclined or ready for more: they build the Pilot Robot Kit, and the coding levels up. For a full K-12 pipeline, we recommend Treads in kindergarten, first, and second grade, then Pilot from third grade, Axle in grades 6 to 8, and Medical Robotics on our True Robotics CTE Kit in high school.

We built math and ELA practice right into the True Robotics Treads coding blocks, so your students solve a math or reading task inside the program they're writing. They practice skills like addition, subtraction, ordering numbers, counting by fives and tens, and rhyming words. The feedback is instant: a right answer sends the Treads Robot through the rest of the code, and a wrong answer keeps it still. In older grades, that grows into vocabulary, high-frequency words, and long vowel sounds.

Very little. Most of the teachers we work with report that prep for a True Robotics lesson takes about five minutes once they understand the flow. Most of that is the PowerPoint loading. Your lesson plan, presentation, entrance ticket, reflection, and answer keys are all ready in our Curriculum Portal, so there is nothing to write. Our goal is to bring your teachers' prep time all the way down to zero.

Yes. Every True Robotics program is a great fit for any learning environment, including traditional, alternative, and sub-therapeutic settings, as well as afterschool programs and summer camps. Every lesson file comes as an editable Word document, so your teachers can make modifications and accommodations for different groups of students. Treads works especially well for students who struggle with workbook seat work. Audrey Brooks, a special education teacher in Worcester Public Schools, saw her students applying basic code in a short time.

No. Your students never need a username or password for True Robotics Playground, and we collect no data on your students. That saves class time, since nobody is typing in a password, and it protects your students' privacy. Students can still save their programs to their Chromebook to keep working in a later class or hand one in to their teacher. Your teachers do have accounts, which we set up together in their 30-minute intro session.

In kindergarten, robotics with True Robotics means Paving the Way with Treads, where your students code the ready-to-use Treads Robot while practicing grade-level math and reading. Our kindergarten curriculum has 25 lessons of about 30 minutes, and your students code with simple picture blocks in True Robotics Playground. They count, add with dots and dice, and explore shapes, and they practice rhyming words and high-frequency words with Treads. Along the way, they solve robot puzzles and learn to debug their programs.

In 3rd grade, robotics with True Robotics means coding a robot while practicing grade-level skills, in Paving the Way with Treads or Taking Off with Pilot. In Treads, your students code the ready-to-use Treads Robot through 25 lessons of about 30 minutes, with multiplication, fractions, and vocabulary. In Pilot, they build the Pilot Robot Kit and code it through 25 lessons of 45 to 60 minutes, with fractions, measuring, and forces.