Introductory · SPIKE Coding Project 1

Wake Up Your Robot

Get your robot's brain powered on, connected, and running its first program.

Student PIN:

Project: Coding Project 1
Strand: Coding
Phase: Get Connected
Time: One class period
What You Are Doing: Powering on the , connecting the SPIKE App to it, and running a program that is already planned for you.
What You Need: SPIKE Prime hub
Charging cable
Tablet or Chromebook with the SPIKE App
This project sheet
Before You Start: Nothing. This is the first project.

Before you start: type your PIN in the box at the top of the page. Your teacher gave you this number. When you finish, press Download to save a local copy of your answers. This does not turn in your work automatically; give the downloaded file to your teacher.

Try It — Meet the Machine

Before you turn anything on, look closely at your . It is a small computer, and it is about to become the brain of your robot.

Find each part below. Check the box when you have found it.

The center button — the big one in the middle of the face
The button — on the side, with its own tiny light
The six lettered ports — A, C, and E down one side; B, D, and F down the other
The light grid — a 5×5 square of tiny lights on the face
The USB port — on the end, where the charging cable goes
The speaker holes — the robot can make sounds too

⚠ You Are In Charge of This Battery

The battery lives inside the hub, and it is your team’s job to keep it ready. These rules are not suggestions.

Charge with the cable and charger your teacher gave you — nothing else.
Never leave a battery charging unattended overnight.
Charge in a cool, open space — never buried under a pile of LEGO.
Put the robot away charged. The next class starts where you left it.
If a hub will not wake up, plug it in for ten minutes before you decide it is broken.

Why is “put it away charged” a rule about being fair to the next team as much as it is about the battery?

Learn It — How You Talk to a Robot

You will not build your programs on the hub itself. You will build them in the SPIKE App on your tablet or Chromebook — and then send them over to the hub.

The program travels across a short-range radio link called . No wires, no internet — just your device and your robot, talking directly to each other. (A USB cable works too, and your teacher may have you use one.)

The Big Idea

The program runs on the hub, not on your tablet. The app is just the workbench. Once your program is across, the robot can run it with no tablet anywhere near it — and that is exactly what happens in a match.

One robot among many

Every hub has a name. Here is why that matters: your classroom has a whole shelf of hubs that look exactly alike, and Bluetooth does not care about that — the app lists every hub it can hear.

Pick the wrong name from that list and your program lands on someone else’s robot. Their robot starts doing your program, your robot does nothing, and both teams spend ten minutes confused.

In your own words: why does your hub need a name that is different from every other hub in the room?

What you will see

Inside the app you will work in the coding canvas — a big open space where blocks snap together into programs, with a colorful shelf of blocks down the side. You will learn what every part of it does in this project and the next.

Do It — Get Connected

Work through these in order. Check each one off as you finish it.

Step 1 — Power on

Press and hold the center button until the hub plays a sound and the light grid wakes up.

The hub is on and the light grid is showing something

Step 2 — Find your hub’s name

Your teacher may have put the name on a sticker, or assigned your team a hub. Find the name and write it on your card below — you will need it every single time.

My Robot Card

Hub name

Tablet or Chromebook I use (number or label)

My project name (fill in two steps from now)

Keep this card. Every project after this one starts by connecting the same way.

Step 3 — Make your project

Open the SPIKE App. Choose New Project, and pick Word Blocks. Name it First Project — and put your names in the project name too.

⚠ Naming rules --- these matter

Letters, numbers, and plain spaces. Say what the project is and whose it is.

Good: First Project - Sam and Ava · Waypoint - Team 3

Bad: Untitled 7 · project final FINAL v2!!! · :)

A bad name will not fail today. It will hide from you in a month, when the list has forty projects in it.

My project exists, with a real name, and it is on my Robot Card

Step 4 — Connect to your robot

Press the hub’s button — its little light starts blinking. In the app, open the connect screen and look at the list. Find your hub’s name from your card and pick it.

This screen is normal

The app may say your hub needs an update before it can connect. Nothing is wrong — get your teacher. Updates are routine and take a few minutes.

The app shows my hub connected, with a little battery meter for it

Step 5 — Look around the canvas

Find each of these before you use any of them.

Part	What it does
Block shelf	The colored categories down the side. Every command you will ever give this robot lives on this shelf.
Canvas	The open space where blocks snap together into a program.
Run button	Sends your program across to the hub and starts it.
Stop button	Stops whatever the hub is doing. Know where this is before you need it.
Connect icon	Shows which hub you are talking to, and its battery level.
Project name	At the top. Tap it to rename the project.

Step 6 — Run a program somebody else planned

Build this exactly as shown — drag the yellow block out first, then snap the purple one underneath. You did not plan this program and you do not need to understand it yet. That is Project 2.

Press Run. Watch the hub — not the tablet.

Letters scrolled across the hub’s light grid

You pressed a button on the tablet, but the letters appeared on the robot. How did the program get from one to the other?

Step 7 — Run it on the robot — no tablet

When you pressed Run, the app also parked your program in a numbered on the hub. The hub keeps it there even with the app closed. Prove it:

On the robot	Do this
1	Put the tablet down. Step away from it.
2	Use the hub’s left and right buttons until the light grid shows your program’s slot number.
3	Press the center button. Watch.

Two Different Run Buttons

The one in the app is for checking your work quickly while you build. The one on the hub is how the robot runs on its own — which is what it will be doing in a match, with nobody touching it.

I ran the program from the hub itself, with no tablet in my hands

Step 8 — Shut down properly

Do it in this order:

Hold the center button until the hub plays its shutdown sound and the lights go out.
Check the battery. Low? Plug it in to charge.
Wrap the cable. Put the robot away the way you would want to find it.

Shut down in the correct order, battery checked

Where Your Work Lives

Your project is saved on the device you used — not on the hub, and not in the sky. Use a different tablet tomorrow and your project will not be on it. That is why the device number is on your Robot Card: same team, same device, every time.

Hub Acting Frozen?

If the hub stops responding, hold the center button down until it switches all the way off, then power it on again. That fixes almost everything.

Score It — Checkpoint

There is no field mission yet. Your score for this project is whether you can do the whole thing again without the sheet.

Can you do it again?

I can power the hub on and off correctly, in the right order
I know my hub’s name and where to find it
I can connect the app to my hub — not someone else’s
I can create a Word Blocks project with a name my team can find again
I can run a program from the app
I can run a program from the hub’s slot, with no tablet
I know which device my project is saved on

Trouble log

Something almost certainly went wrong. That is normal and it is worth writing down — you will hit the same thing again.

What went wrong

How I fixed it

Think about it

You pressed Run and the robot did something. Who decided what it would do — you, or the person who planned the blocks you copied?

Name one thing on this sheet you would tell a teammate to be careful about, and why.

In Project 2 — Your First Program, you will pull that little two-block program apart and find out what every block actually does. Then you will change it and make it yours.

Download saves a local copy of your answers. It does not turn in your work automatically; give the downloaded file to your teacher.