STEM Lab Round 1

The 2022-2023 school year is off to an amzing start in the Sinclair STEM Lab! The first unit of the year is mostly about computer programming in order to introduce new students to coding, and to review for those students who are returning. There have been many wonderful creative computing projects in the upper grades. Meanwhile, Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades have been learning the fundamentals of computer science. Our younger students have also had the chance to do some creative building.

Kindergarten, First, & Second

The first STEM lab rotation for K, 1, and 2 is centered on Code.org computer science courses. Students are introduced to core computer programming concepts and practice algorithmic thinking through a variety of puzzles. There is not always as much scope for student creativity as I would like with these exercises, but the stuctured practice gives them a strong foundation for the creative computing projects that are to come. We split our time between programming on screens and unplugged activities. One of those unplugged experiences had second grade taking turns playing the part of a robot being programmed to follow a set of instructions to create an arrangement of stacked cups. Everyone discovered the importance of clear commands when writing a program. Each week ended with some building stations giving students a chance to flex their creative muscles.

Third

Third grade began the year becoming familiar with using their Scratch accounts. We went over the importance of good digital citizenship and digital etiquette. Their project was drawn from the Harvard Creative Computing Lab's outstanding Getting Unstuck curriculum materials and explored the idea of parallelism, when 2 or more things are happening at the same time in a program. The prompt is open-ended to allow for maximum student choice and creative expression. Along the way, students explored example projects to draw inspiration for their own work. They reflected on their experiences and learning in their STEM lab journals. We practiced comment on our code, leaving little notes on the scripts in a program that tell others what that bit of the program does. Students also practiced leaving each other helpful feedback on the project pages. All of the parallelism projects can be found in the Parallelism G3 studio.

Fourth

The fourth grade also got back into Scratch through a Getting Unstuck project. Theirs focused on using the broadcast function in Scratch. Broadcasts are pair of blocks that let students control when various elements in a program start running. They can be used to let characters have a conversation, change levels in a game, play different melodies, and much more. Again, the prompt is wide open for full creative scope. Students created projects that shared facts about the Grand Canyon, told knock knock jokes, animated stories, and played games; just to name a few. The broadcast projects are collected in this studio: Broadcasts G4.

Fifth

The fith grade started the year learning to use lists in Scratch. They are quite familiar with using variables to keep track of scores and lives and other bit of information. Lists however, which store several pieces of information, are compeltely new. They explored some examples and we discussed the different list blocks that were used. There was a fair bit of trial and error getting projects working as intended and no shoratge of creativity in the final products. I have been really impressed with the troubleshooting and debugging strategies and the level of perseverence I have seen so far. The full studio of list projects can be experienced here: Lists G5.