Bee Bots in the Classroom

The first time I heard about Bee Bots was when Lorraine Leo, an IT teacher from Jackson School in Massachusetts, sent me a video of a group of five-year-old students using them at  her school.
Lorraine suggested to me to watch this You Tube video on how to introduce the Bee Bots to my class.
A few minutes after I watched the video, I e-mailed it to my DP (who is in charge of the Maths budget) and without hesitation he ordered six Bee Bots and one mat which can be costumised.
After a number of weeks the bots arrived and I started the task of developing resources to go with them. I visited Sparkle Box which has a section of already made cards to use with the mat we bought and at the same time I created six doubled faced mats with their respective task card.

I incorporated the Bee Bots in my reading and maths task boards. The children were focusing in the content of the mats, but what they did not realised is that they were talking about directionality, they were creating a set of very specific instructions and they were using principles of early coding.
The next step will be for the children to develop their own task cards to go with the mats.
A week ago I introduced the Bee Bots to the other teachers in the junior school and the teachers are already using them as part of their task boards and the school is keen on providing every teacher in Years 1 - 3 with one Bee Bot.