KUBO is incredibly versatile and can be used in teaching across the curriculum!
The ideas in this blog will get students designing and making costumes for KUBO, a great opportunity to include Art and Design activities in your KUBO lessons. The students will also need to collaborate on designing an algorithm to display their creations. This will require students to communicate within a small group or the whole class and enable them to use their Computational Thinking skills to create, test, and debug a suitable algorithm.
As an introduction, you might like to show the students examples of KUBO in different costumes. There are pictures in this blog you are welcome to use, there are also printable costumes for an Explorer, Robin Hood, an Ant, a Superhero, and an Elf on the KUBO Website, along with a printable blank costume template. Discuss with the students what they might need to think about when making a costume, how will it stay on KUBO? Will KUBO be able to move in it? What sort of materials would they like to use? Making a paper template can be an easy way to check fit and function.
The students will need to collaborate on a catwalk/runway program for KUBO. They will need to think about how many KUBOs will be in their parade, how far KUBO will need to travel. All the dressed KUBOs will need to be able to parade up and down to show off their fantastic costumes without bumping into each other! A program such as this may be suitable, depending on how many KUBOs will be in the final parade.
In this example, all the KUBOs had the same function recorded onto them and they were placed on the Play Tagtile® one after another.
The activity you choose to run could be Halloween-themed, or how about making characters from a book the students have been reading. Maybe the students could make animal costumes and the algorithm could be designed to mimic their behavior. There are so many activities that can involve designing and making costumes for KUBO.
On to the costumes, there is a template included at the end of this blog which is a great starting point. However, the students do not need to stick to this. If given a range of materials and some initial inspiration their creativity will flow. They will need to regularly check that KUBO can still move in their costume, a simple function like this will enable them to check regularly.
Hints and tips
It’s worth recording the final parade function on to the KUBOs before the students attach the costumes, as KUBO may not run as smoothly over the TagTiles once there are additional layers on the base.
Make sure the students test the final function with the same number of KUBOs as they will use for the final parade.
The test function can be recorded using a different color, so both the test and final functions can be recorded onto KUBO at the start.
Costume ideas
I hope your students have as much fun as we did creating costumes for KUBO.
You can download a blank costume here
