Zero Robotics2026 Middle School Program
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2026 Middle School Program
Educator Guide
View the Educator Guide
Inside you'll find structured lesson plans, programming tutorials, and hands-on experiments like bottle-rocket builds, giving mentors everything they need to teach both the coding and the science behind controlling satellites in space.
Block Curriculum
A seven-assignment classroom curriculum for AsteroidBee, taught entirely in the Graphical (block) Editor. Students go from "what is this website" to a full competitive strategy, one block pattern at a time. Every assignment ships as a student worksheet, a printable packet, and a teacher guide written for non-programmer teachers.
The one idea everything depends on: a block program is not a recipe that plays out over time. The init page runs once; the main page runs once per second, every second, all 180 seconds. Multi-step plans need a step variable and if blocks — that state-machine pattern is the backbone of the series, taught one piece at a time.
Assignments
| # | Assignment | Project | Core idea | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Hello, Satellite! | Free Mode | The IDE; init vs main pages; the main page runs every second — prove it with DEBUG | Worksheet · Printable · Teacher |
| 02 | One Block to Move | Free Mode | One setPos block is a whole flight plan; two stacked movement blocks are NOT two stops | Worksheet · Printable · Teacher |
| 03 | Am I There Yet? | AsteroidBee 2026 | Sense every second: read position into an array, detect arrival with an if | Worksheet · Printable · Teacher |
| 04 | Two Stops, One Brain | AsteroidBee 2026 | The state machine: a step variable + if blocks = multi-step plans | Worksheet · Printable · Teacher |
| 05 | Spy Camera | AsteroidBee 2026 | First scoring: auto-aim every second; photograph only when an if guard says go | Worksheet · Printable · Teacher |
| 06 | Power and Pickups | AsteroidBee 2026 | Items + the energy economy on the state machine; park to pick up | Worksheet · Printable · Teacher |
| 07 | Full Mission | AsteroidBee 2026 | Capstone competitive strategy, scrimmages, and the strategy memo | Worksheet · Printable · Teacher |
Six sessions only? Merge 06 into 07 (teach the item plan as the opening phase of the capstone). Do not cut 04, it is the keystone.
Reference Pack
| How blocks run — the per-cycle model explained for teachers (read this first) | |
| Game rules — arena, light/dark, photos, items, energy, fuel (read from the game source) | |
| Block dictionary — every block pictured, with the exact C it generates |
Before day 1: create one Graphical Editor project on Free Mode and one on AsteroidBee 2026, confirm the AsteroidBee block categories appear in the palette, run one simulation, and find the log where DEBUG messages print. The full checklist is on the first page of every teacher guide.
