Curriculum Review: Classroom Activities for the Busy Teacher EV3

In our 4-family little co-op this year, I am pleased to be teaching our older kids (5 boys) about some Lego EV3 programming and building.  Two of those boys are also participating in our homeschool charter school's Lego team, so they are seeing the robots and programming at their weekly meeting and competitions as well.  The other 3 boys have no other outside experience with the EV3 or Lego programming.   This book by Damien Kee is a resource I saw on Amazon, and was immediately interested because as a busy mom I honestly wanted a structured framework for teaching EV3 but didn't want to create it myself.  I have a background in programming, but EV3 is new to me, to give you an idea of my background coming into this. 

Here are my impressions:  I'm using this resource in a homeschool co-op environment with 5 boys ages 9-11. Each lesson in the book is designed to utilize about 5 hours of time. We don't have that much each week, so I split the lessons between weeks, and have the boys work on the student pages and programming at home in between sessions. It is taking us about 2 weeks per "week" of lessons. The boys are learning a lot, and the format of the lessons is easy for me as a parent teacher to utilize, even with limited EV3 background. There is a nice mix of theory and practice in the book to discuss, giving a great foundation. The math is manageable for the kids at the level I'm teaching with a little help here and there for those who hadn't encountered circumference or pi yet.