Watch Videos-Tips, Tricks, and Towers

1. Go to the Kinazium YouTube Tutorial Playlist and have your class watch the first five videos to learn tips for working with Kinazium. These culminate in a video for building a complex tower.

Procedure

1. Get out one set of Kinazium with a group of students. Introduce the Quickstart Guide to the students.

1. Show the kids the various parts and their purpose:
   
   Mat - The base unit for building structures. The edge pieces of the mat, can be folded up to create a barrier around the edges. Pegs can be placed in the holes, which walls and ramps will connect to. The Mats can be put together in any configuration, and multiple Kinaziums can be used for very large game and courses.
   
   Walls and Ramps - Walls are the panels with holes, ramps are the solid panels. Walls can bend and will go back to a flat shape when put back at the end of the session.
   
   Pegs - Pegs can be used in various ways to connect walls to each other and to the base mat. They can be also used to add walls or ramps for decoration or movement, like gates or blades.
   
   Remember, there are no rules! Students will discover new ways to put these simple parts together, it’s pretty awesome to see their imaginations at work.

1. After watching the videos and using the quickstart Guide, have one student at a time create the structure in one of the pictures on the front of the card.
   
   
   

Vocabulary

Kinazium: The combination of the words Kinetics and Gymnasium. This is a great guessing game with students, ask if they can think of the two words that make up Kinazium.

Assessment

Discuss the results with the students. Ask them if they have any questions about using Kinazium. Make sure they know how you would like them to cleanup Kinazium when they are through using it.

TEACHING TIP: If students don't want to put away Kinazium, take a photo of their progress so they are sure they can recreate what they have built for the next time you bring it out.

After learning building skills, have the students work together to create a maze with a simple pathway that they can drive or program a robot to follow.

For a challenging exercise have students build the curved ramp that comes down from two stories in the Tower tutorial video. Test by driving a robot down the ramp and attempt to land into a hoop or knock over a set of blocks.