STEM Snapshot: April 1-26, 2019

Students have been taking on the role as a Local Collaborator and practicing their collaboration skills through two different stations; LEGO Education Kits & Robots. Over time, the tools are of going to change, but the life skills will always be important such as following directions in order, making changes when things don’t work the first time, and working with others who might not be our best friend.

Here are the tools that students have been exposed to and practiced with. You may have seen some of it in action in your child’s Seesaw account!

Kindergarten

• Bee Bots- Coding the Bee Bot (disguised as the Very Hungry Caterpillar), to “eat the different foods” on the grid. The robot helps teach the basics of sequencing a code.
• LEGO Mixed Bucket- Students built the different foods that the Very Hungry Caterpillar eats but had to make sure that it wasn’t too big for the paper caterpillar to eat

1st Grade

• Dot Robots- As a class, we are viewing and experimenting with pre-built codes in the Creativity Kit for Dot. These codes are written where we can play games with it. This will help us understand how Dot reads code to complete a task.
• LEGO WeDo 1.0- Students got to choose different builds that had 1 or more moving parts when complete.

2nd Grade

• Dot Robots- Guided coding small groups using Challenge Cards. These help us  understand how to create a code using different categories to make Dot complete a task.
• LEGO Simple Machines- Students learned about the basic simple machines and had the opportunity to choose different tasks to build to demonstrate how they work

3rd & 4th Grades

• LEGO WeDo 2.0- Majority of classes started with the build, Milo the Science Rover. Once built, it can be coded to complete different tasks. There were also additional add-ons for this build as well.
• Dash Robots- Partner coding using Challenge Cards. These help us  understand how to create a code using different categories to make Dash complete a task. Each card builds on one another and leaves room for exploration and adding to the original code sequence.

5th Grade

• LEGO Mindstorms, EV3- Once built, students will be able to code this robot to move and sense objects in its path. Students will also experiment with the LEGO Mindstorms website with virtual EV3s (the computer portion).