STEM Lab Year 4 Approaches

August is upon us, and my teacher summer is almost over. I hope everyone had a great summer, and I am looking forward to seeing our wonderful Sinclair families at Meet the Teacher on the 24th. As the title of the post indicates, this will the be 4th year of the Sinclair STEM Lab. Time definitely flies when you're having fun!

Pi Camp Minecraft Selfies

Making friends at Smither Park Houston 

My summer was fairly low key compared to some other years. I spent a week leading a Raspberry Pi camp for middle school girls. That was a great experience. The girls learned several physical computing skills with both Scratch and Python. They built and programmed motion sensing cameras learned to render selfies in Minecraft blocks. At the end of the week the girls got to take everything home along with some resource books so they could continue learning.

Big Bambu at MFAH

I spent some time working on some personal making skills projects with an eye to adapting them to the lab. Some were successful, others I'm still working on. I also took time to see some of the great places in Houston, and beyond. I returned to Smither Park which is coming along nicely and visited the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Big Bambu and the Digital Worlds exhibits. I spent some time in Austin where I checked out the Blanton Museum and went to Corpus Christi to watch a hatchling sea turtle release at Padre Island National Seashore.

Posing with Lego Scratch Cat

At the end of July, my wife (also a STEM Lab teacher in HISD) and I traveled to Boston to lead a workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about how our students use the Scratch programming language to create interdisciplinary projects. Our workshop began with an overview of how we go about planning projects for our labs (all the teacher stuff). The second part was a gallery of projects created by the students at Sinclair and Piney Point. Many of these were interactive displays, and yes, we did cart 18 or so student work samples from Houston to Boston. We had about 50 people attend our workshop, which I confess is at least double the number I was expecting given how many amazing sessions were running concurrently with ours. I do not think it is overstating things to say that everyone was deeply impressed by the work of our students. So bravo Sinclair Superstars (and Piney Point Panthers)! Your work was on show at MIT and amazed the audience!

So many people 

Friday at 11, we're up

This was part of the Scratch@MIT Conference. Scratch was developed at the MIT Media Lab 11 years ago, so this was very much a pilgrimage to the home of one of the most central tools for the work we do in our labs. It was also a chance to connect with and learn from teachers, educators, and developers from around the world who use Scratch. It was a truly amazing experience, and we left with our brains completely overloaded with new ideas. 

Storm King Art Center is amazing!

On our way back to Texas we stopped here and there to visit family and friends in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. These included stops at Storm King Art Center, the Finger Lakes, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Beech Creek Gardens.

So now I am home and feverishly planning for the upcoming year. Students at all grade levels will make and do amazing things. I am so excited to get back into the lab and see all of wonders the students create. There will be computer programming for all! There will be robots! There will be so much cardboard!