Round 4 in the STEM lab has been truly wonderful! The students have done some amazing work and leanred so much. From programming robots to interactive posters to hacked works of art, I could hardly be more proud. Read on for a look at what we have been up to in the lab.
Kindergarten & 1st grade
Robo-Mouse returns! This is always a fun unit to teach in large part because of the excitement of the students. At this point in the year they have had a great deal of experience watching their programs run on a screen. The year started with Code.org coursework and was followed later with Scratch Jr. However, there is a special thrill to seeing one's code run in the physical world as the Robo-mouse moves through the mazes students constructed.
In Kindergarten we start with a general introduction to handling the robot to keep it safe, and then we do a couple short programming exercises together so we can discuss the differences between this and our screen-based programming tools. Then students work in groups to create a maze for their robot and take turns coding it to the cheese. After this initial exploration time, students are given task cards with mazes to build and then program the mouse to navigate. The task cards describe long mazes requiring more complex programs to complete.
Most of the 1st graders remember using Robo-mouse last year, so we begin with a brief review and some exploration time in order for them to get reacquainted with the device. The rest of the week they work on a series of increasingly challenging task cards. They build the maze and, before getting their hands on a robot, they use the algorithm cards to plan their programs. This gives them the chance to develop their algorithmic thinking and to practice debugging as they identify the place in the program where things went wrong. Each day after they complete the task cards, students are allowed to design their own mazes and they delight in challenging themselves with the most difficult ones they can imagine.
2nd grade
I have wanted to do a math stories unti with second grade for a while, but was not able to get a hold of the books I wanted to use. Thanks to the support of our awesome PTO, I was finally able to gather the desired books to bring math stories to second grade. Most of the books have a focus on building number sense and on operations like addition and multiplication, but we also touch on geometry. After reading and discussing each day's story, students work together on an activity related to the math found in the book. The activities are generally in the form of a number puzzle or problem solving activity. Students have to share their reasoning both with me and their classmates. I was so impressed by the rich discussions I heard students having with each other as I walked around the room. Our geomtry book, Perfect Square, lent itself to a more artistic project. Students decorated and dismantled a plain white square of paper to create a picture inspired by the story. The primary goal of the unit's activities is showing students that there are a variety of strategies, all equally valid that can result in solutions.
3rd grade
In round 3 our third graders selected a science topic to research and then created Scratch project to share what they had learned. Round 4 started with an introduction to the Makey Makey I/O board. The name is an amalgam of "make" and "key" and stands for "make a key". It allows us to use any conductive material to build switches and keys that can communicate with and control our programs. Students practiced setting up the Makey Makey and explored its capabilities with a set of plug and play apps including a piano, audio sampler, and etch-a-sketch drawing program.
Next, students created a poster that complemented their Scratch project. They added metal fasteners and copper foil tape to create touch points for the user to control the program. These were connected to the computer via Makey Makey, here acting as a USB keyboard. The Scratch programs they created use the space and arrow keys as events to run different parts of the code. The Makey Makey is precoded to those keys. Touching the "earth" point and one of the others at the same time closes a circuit that the board reads as a press of that key. The corresponding part ot the Scratch program runs as each point is touched. We wrapped up each week by sharing our work with a visiting first or second grade class. Everyone did a great job presenting! All of the Scratch projects are in this studio.
4th grade
This round was the beginning of a two part project centered on the state parks of Texas. The theme of the fourth grade curriculum is the history and geography of Texas, so this project is a natural tie in. Students explored different sites on the Texas Parks and Wildlife site. They were allowed to select any park that caught their interest to be the subject of their research. I gave them a series of guiding questions to help their notetaking that included identifyinig the region of Texas the their chosen park is in, the history of the park, and the plants and animals that can be found there. After gathering information, the students planned and began programming a digital tour guide for the park using Scratch. The most of the projects are in this studio, but many are works in progress because of the week's other activity.
The fourth graders also participated in a Skype-a-Scientist meeting during this unit. Skype-a-Scientist has been part of many STEM lab units over the years. They partner classroom teachers with scientists working in a variety of fields. Students have tthe chance to have a conversation about a scientific topic with an expert and to learn about what it is like to work as a scientist. I requested ecologists for this particular round of meetings because one of the things I want to students to investigate about their park is the ecosystem it is a part of. Skype-a-Scientist took 2 days of the unit, one to learn background on ecology and our scientist's particular focus, and one day for the meeting. Each meeting is a bit different, but they are always interesting.
5th grade
This round's fifth grade project is one I have done in a few different iterations in recent years, and I look forward to it. I alternately refer to it as "Interactive Art" or "Hacked Art". Students select a painting from a famous artist from a collection I have put in a Google folder. Students are allowed to suggest a painting that is not one of the ones provided, but I do insist on approving it. The painting gets loaded into Scratch as a background first, and then as a sprite. Using the image tools, students erase all of the painting added as a sprite except for an element that they want to be interactive. They place this element against the background where it blends in. This sprite is coded to react to being clicked. This process is repeated several time until most of the painting has been made interactive. I always love seeing the creative outputs the students imagine into the paintings. Below are two standout projects (it was really hard to choose just 2). Click the green flag and then click the elements of the painting. Sound on to get the full effect. The complete hacked art studio is here. (Until 2/17/2023 the projects at the top of the studio are works in progress.)
