Oh man our kids love Spheros so much. We were lucky enough to get a class set of 15 Sphero Bolts this year, which is great – last year we just had five (and at any given time only three of them were likely to work), and it’s hard to share these babies between more than two or three students. 15 is perfect.
Whenever we use Spheros, I let the kids play around for a few minutes first. Honestly, in “Drive” mode, they’re basically just fancy RC cars, but who can resist an RC car? Once they’ve gotten that out of their systems, we start introducing engineering challenges (constructing bridges, tunnels, mazes etc. for Sphero to navigate; seeing how much weight Sphero can carry on the chariot) or asking them to use block coding to operate Sphero.
Here’s the handout I made for a couple of PD sessions this school year. It has some ideas for how to use Sphero in the classroom, and lots of links. Enjoy, and good luck!