We’re so excited to welcome Mrs. Baker and her third graders to our AT&T Classroom. Housed on the Kent State campus in Moulton Hall, the AT&T Classroom was established in 1998 to serve as a research lab and a teacher training/student outreach setting. The AT&T classroom is able to offer teachers and students opportunities to gain experience with a variety of digital devices and applications to support teaching and learning for STEM learning (science, technology, engineering, & mathematics). We would like to share via this newsletter the exciting work the students did this past week.
Robotics with LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Essential
To promote the students’ development of important STEM skills, the third graders are working with the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Essential system. SPIKE Essential is designed to introduce young students to engineering and robotics by combining traditional LEGO bricks that the students use for building their models in combination with the SPIKE app to program simple code for adding movement and sound to their projects. At the start of the week, the third graders completed several tutorial activities designed to introduce them to the system’s icon-based coding blocks and help them develop an understanding of foundational code sequences for programming.
Across the week the students developed an understanding of how their LEGO builds are powered by a Hub, which is attached to motors and sensors. The students learned that they could create code, which tells the Hub what activity to perform, such as making a wheel spin for a set number of rotations or adding sound or a flashing light.
After building an understanding of the coding sequences, the third graders moved into a science unit within the LEGO SPIKE system with a lesson that focused on weather hazards with a design challenge to plan, design, and program a pet house that includes one design feature to protect against a specific storm hazard.
In addition to introductory programming and coding skills, exploring robotics systems such as LEGO SPIKE also supports the development of skills related to sequencing and numeracy while also fostering children's creativity and critical thinking.
