Greetings for the 17-18 School Year!

Hello to all our JWP Families coming back for another year of quality education!

One of my goals for STEM Class this year is to connect the students with as many people around the world as possible. Since our theme for the year is "The Amazing Race," I want the students to learn about professions and cultures around the world.

If you know of someone (or perhaps, you are a someone) that would like to share their work or share something about a different culture or part of the world, please let me know!

An easy way to do that is to fill out a time to call in to our class via Skype, Google Hangouts, or FaceTime! (You could also come in person if you're local and so inclined.)

Here is our Google Sheet with times throughout the school year to sign up!

Looking forward to another great year!

End of Year Genius Hour

For the week of May 15th, the staff here at the elementary school experimented with setting up some personalized learning work in their classrooms. Since I only have a class two or three times a week, I thought I would give the students in STEM a little longer time to work.

There were six or seven days (depending on the rotation) of STEM class left, and I wanted the students to try different things, to learn something new, or explore something that we didn't spend a lot of time on previously.

I had a "Big Giant List of Options" on the white board in our room for the students to "Choose their Own Adventure," and am I glad to report that there were some great creations, learning, and fun had in the last few weeks of class. (This list had another 2 columns by the time the first two days were done!)


Lots of students picked the "Build with Cardboard" option; so much so, that I ran out of old projects!
Here's a sample of some of the activity that happened in our room over the last few weeks.

Connecting with the Minnesota Raptor Center

One of my favorite new tech tools of this school year is a site and app called Flipgrid. I first heard about Flipgrid at EdCamp Twin Cites in October of 2016. Our EdCamp was held at Flipgrid's headquarters in downtown Minneapolis. It was a really neat building and flexible workspace. (It just shows how we can use a flexible space model in our classrooms to emulate "real life" workspaces.)

What is Flipgrid, you may ask? Your grid is like a homepage, and in that page, you can add topics where people can respond to a prompt with a video! It's great for amplifying student voice - giving even quiet students a chance to have their voices heard.

Anyhow, Flipgrid teamed up last year with a scientist in Antarctica to share the things that she was doing as she studied different things down in the southern continent. This year, they teamed up with Mike at the Minnesota Raptor Center to help us learn more about different raptors as well as to share ideas about birds in our neighborhood and how we can help conserve our natural resources.

We had a chance to get a shout out from Mike - they shared a video of getting a weight on a barred owl, and Mike said that the owl weighed "785," but he didn't give a unit of measurement. So, we made a quick video asking what he meant by that number, and he made us a video response! Check out the videos below.

We spent the first two weeks of May connecting with the Minnesota Raptor Center, and having fun giving our feedback on Flipgrid!

3D Design Portfolios

All month we have been working on a portfolio of designs using the site Tinkercad.

I'm excited to share with you some of the designs that the kids have made!

Check out the slideshow below, and ask your child about their designs.

3D Design!

Happy April!

The students are beginning work with Tinkercad and their 3D Designs! Our first design is going to be something that serves a purpose.

There were some other restrictions on the project as well:

• Includes name
• Includes at least 3 shapes
• Maximum dimensions: 6 cm (length) x 6 cm (width) x 2 cm (z-axis (tall))

Example: keychain, bookmark, magnet, necklace pendant

Tinkercad is an easy-to-use web site that uses a library of 3D shapes that can be manipulated in many directions. Then, you can download the file for the 3D Printer!

We are excited to have a new 3D Printer in the classroom this year. Hopefully, it will help us get our prints faster.

I look forward to seeing what the kids will make!

Sphero Olympics 6 - Final Thoughts

After looking at the feedback and hearing the responses from the students, I declare that the Sphero Olympics was a huge success!

I'm looking forward to designing a similar project next year for the Spheros. Hopefully we'll have an equally good theme next year so that the students will have to solve challenges in unique ways with coding.

I took all the videos and pictures that I have taken throughout the Sphero Olympics unit and I put them together into a video. Please enjoy it below!

Sphero Olympics 5 - Feedback

As with any major project, feedback is extremely important. As we wrapped up our Sphero Olympics project here at the end of the 3rd quarter, I wanted the students to be able to give me feedback on what they liked, didn't like, and would improve about the Sphero Olympics project.

Here are some tidbits of information that the students provided:

What I learned from this project was how to be partners and work together in STEM.

Coding is important because if you have the wrong code it does not go your way.

I learned to not be frustrated when something does not work, and I learned to cooperate.

I learned that it takes a lot of effort to make a good program.

I learned that when you fail, just try again.

I learned to wait and do not boss people around when doing the project.

One thing I learned is that it takes a lot of hard work and teamwork to do things correctly. 

Rated on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high).

I think that having around 70% of the students honestly say that I gave them enough help and guidance through this project is a pretty good number. Hopefully those that rated 1-3 offered feedback in the comments as to why they felt that way. It's important to me to help all students feel like I am available to them if they need me.

Check back at the end of this month to see more about our next project!

Sphero Olympics 4 - Mile Run Google Sheets

Doing the Sphero Olympics has allowed us to use a Google Suite for Education App that we don't normally use very often in elementary school. Google Sheets allows us to look at numerical data to compare sets of numbers. For the Sphero Games, we used a spreadsheet to keep track of each group's time for the Mile Run - four times around our 10' by 6' track.

We also talked about conditional formatting - how we can highlight the fastest time (smallest number) in green, the slowest time (largest number) in red, and then have the middle time (median) in yellow.

Finally, we talked about how we could use a formula to find the fastest time and put it in a row by itself at the bottom so we could easily find out who was the fastest in all of 3-6th grade!

Check out our spreadsheet of results below!

   

Sphero Olympics 3 - Programming with SPRK

Hello Families!

The Sphero Olympics is still going in full force in the STEM Classroom. For those of you that might not be aware, we have STEM every other day in the four-day rotation. Our class lasts around 25 minutes long, so we have to use every moment to our advantage.

We are using a Chrome App called SPRK Lightning Lab to program our Sphero Robots. SPRK uses block-based (and text based) programming to control the Spheros. We used block-based programs. We used a block that looped the code over and over again to make the Sphero go around our track four times.

Here's an example of one of the programs:

Each group had to figure out how fast, how long, and in what direction to point their robot. It took a lot of trial and error! We talked about how we can determine which angles to use by thinking about a circle - 360 degrees! We figured out that adding a 'delay' block in between each 'roll' helped the Sphero make better corners. So much great thinking!

Check for the next post to see some of our times for the mile run!

Sphero Olympics

We are continuing to work on our Sphero Olympics projects!

Our first event is the Olympic opening ceremony, where each group's Sphero Athlete needed to walk around the arena one time.

Here are some videos of our athletes entering the stadium!

Sphero Olympics Hype!

In 3rd-6th Grade, we are currently doing a unit called "Sphero Olympics."

Spheros are spherical robots which can be controlled using an iPad or Computer. We started to get a taste for the Spheros by driving them around our classroom. Here's a little video from last year when we started the first time:

For the the JWP version of the Olympics, we paired up and each pair of students picked a country that participates in the Olympics from this list. Students then researched the country, learning the population, what money they use, athletes from the country, and how far they had to travel to get to Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Summer Games.

Students then designed a paper doll athlete from their country, choosing colors based on the outfits that the athletes wore in the Parade of Nations. I think they look pretty good!

Our Olympic Village is taking shape! Here are our Sphero Athletes from many nations! #mncodes #SpheroOlympics pic.twitter.com/G4TwFHEYVu

— Rachel J. Pierson (@RPiersonEdu) January 19, 2017

Our first event will be the Parade of Nations where the athletes will walk into the games, and then our first competition will be a "running" race around the track on the floor in our room. The students will have to use a block programming app called SPRK Lightning Lab to program the Sphero Robots to accomplish these tasks.  Look for the second January blog update with the results!