As our students start to see more and more of these additional technologies outside of school, it's really important that schools try to incorporate them. I think these are all things that would fit really well into a Makerspace in the library. The Makerspace at Camelot Elementary School in FCPS uses Scratch programming and MXT Robotics. This YouTube video shows how they use those programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=32&v=Hcnww3N-vHA. The students' eyes just light up when they talk about what they've been able to create in the Makerspace.
I have also seen first hand how kids can get excited about coding. Every kid in my school participated in the Hour of Code this year. They came back from the computer lab talking very animatedly about what they got to do. We work so hard to get students to explain their steps and break projects or ideas down into smaller steps. Coding requires them to go through that step by step process. I know not all schools have computer labs, but as a librarian hopefully I could offer the option of doing some coding to at least the students who are interested in it.
Robotics is something that, as a teacher, I'm pretty sure there would be plenty of students who know more about it than I do. While that's a little scary, what better way to give a student the opportunity to excel. I've had students come in and tell me about what they've built or done in robotics club. We've seen a few movies come out recently dealing with robotics such as Big Hero 6. It would be nice to be able to tie in some of their personal lives into what we're doing in class. We build circuits in 4th grade and I know they build on that throughout their science careers. Adding robotics would take those ideas to another level.
3D printing is another piece that would be nice to integrate into the classroom. Students could be required to design something for the printer that goes along with a particular project. I've done that before, but they've only been able to draw it or create it out of some kind of other material. Imagine the look on their faces when they see something they've designed come to life on a printer!
As much as it would be nice to incorporate these things into school, I imagine that funding for them is something that might be hard to come by or at least something that needs to be found through grants or other alternative funding.
I had the same thoughts you did about funding! I agree with you that there are some great ideas for incorporating robots and 3D printing into the classroom (the connection with Big Hero 6 would be so much fun for the students!). As a teacher it's hard to brainstorm things that could be practical, though, because for me it's the first tool in this class that I don't think I'd be able to incorporate in the classroom for at least a few years. Thanks for sharing these ideas, though; I will be keeping them in mind :)
ReplyDeleteI loved the idea of an hour of code. And I have experienced first hand all of the neat things the students can teach me and eachother. Great to hear about it being used in a library program.
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