Five ways to use RobotMagic in a 40-minute period
22 Jun 2026
Short-format lesson plans for classrooms that don't have a full block of time for coding. Not every school runs on a double period, and a lot of the guidance out there assumes you've got 90 uninterrupted minutes to work with. These five formats are built for the reality of a standard 40-minute slot.
The first is the 'warm-up challenge' — a single, tightly scoped puzzle students open the moment they sit down, before you've even finished attendance. The second is 'pair debug', where students swap half-finished projects with a neighbour and have ten minutes to find and fix one bug before swapping back.
The third and fourth formats cover splitting a single project across two periods with a clean save-and-resume point, and running a 'demo Friday' format where the last ten minutes of the week are reserved for two or three students to show their work to the class.
The fifth is simply narrowing scope: picking one course unit and running it as a standalone lesson rather than trying to fit an entire project arc into 40 minutes. We've tagged every unit in the course library with an estimated single-period time so you can plan without guesswork.