LESSON OVERVIEW

In this lesson plan about warehouse automation, students practise listening skills while expanding their technical vocabulary related to robotics and automation.

LEAD-IN & LISTENING PRACTICE

To activate students’ knowledge of the theme of the lesson, the first activity invites them to discuss the differences between traditional and automated grocery packing warehouses and predict the practical aspects of the latter. Then, students look at a description of the process of preparing an order in an automated warehouse and complete the gaps in the text with some technical words provided (e.g. sensors, totes) to verify their predictions. The next task prepares students for a video about an automatic grocery packing warehouse. They discuss and anticipate the answers to four questions and then watch the video for the first time to check their answers. Next, as a pre-listening task for the second part of the video, they try to match five technical half-phrases and then explain how they could be related to the warehouse. Students check their answers and engage in a discussion about different aspects of automated warehouses.

TECHNICAL LANGUAGE PRACTICE

Their next task is to analyse five sentences from the video and try to guess the meanings of the underlined phrases in each of them (e.g. custom-built, gripper assembly). This is followed by a consolidation activity in which students first complete the gaps in ten categories with one word from the lesson each and then come up with two things that belong to each category. Afterwards, students analyse the process of delivering the stock to an automated warehouse and discuss its possible steps. Finally, this lesson plan about automation ends with a speaking activity in which students speculate how four given  innovations (e.g. cobots, drones) would make this process more efficient.