Ideas for innovation, inspiration, and incorporating STEAM into elementary and middle school classrooms.
NASA 21st Century Teacher Academy
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Blackford Elementary teacher, Anupama Gupta, and I just participated in the very first 21st NASA Century Teacher Academy! We joined 21 other educators from around the country in learning about NASA's mission, current research, and best practices in science and technology.
Educator teams from California, Florida, Hawaii, and Idaho
Some of our highlights from the program included:
Designing our own NASA Mission Patch
3D Printing, Scanning, and LaserCutting in the SpaceShop
Learning about the Centrifuge
Meeting Kurt Long and testing our prototypes in the Fluid Mechanics Lab
Using the Engineering Design Process to design, create, and launch Hot Air Balloons and Parachutes
Touring the ArcJet Lab
Visiting the world's largest Wind Tunnel (80 x 120)
NASA's two newest 21st Century Educators!
Anu and I also used our new learning to create a Project Based Learning NGSS unit on Weather, Climate, and Hot Air Balloons. We are planning to utilize experts from BloomSky and NASA to implement this unit with Anu's third grade class in the fall. Watch our brief overview of the unit below:
The 5th Graders at Forest Hill Elementary School were hard at work turning Dash into the famous person that they had researched. Rosa Yang, Forest Hill's STEAM Task Force Teacher, helped me plan this project, to integrate the math, literacy, and social studies skills that her students were currently working on. Since her students had just finished learning about metric measurement and rounding, we had them put them to the test to make a timeline to scale. Since Dash moves in increments of 10 centimeters, we had students round the lifespan of their famous person to the nearest 10 cm. They were then challenged to place the five most important parts of their person's life on the timeline, starting from their birthdate, rounding each one to the nearest 10 cm. The fifth graders then wrote a sentence describing that important life event. They then used the iPad App "Blockly" to program Dash to start at the beginning of the timeline. Each student was then ab...
At Sherman Oaks Elementary School, all students in grades TK - 6 prepare an exhibition project to present to the community at the end of the school year. I was thrilled when 3rd grade teacher, Vanessa Diaz, reached out to me about planning their exhibition project around the 3rd NGSS standard of Life Cycles and incorporating programming with the Dash Robots. In groups, students researched a plant or animal and the different stages in its life cycle. Each student was then responsible for typing a paragraph about a particular stage in the life cycle in Spanish or English (since Sherman Oaks is a Spanish immersion school). Students then worked with their teams to create a poster to organize the stages of their life cycle. We asked them to map out at least six different stopping points for Dash to stop and teach others about that particular stage. When programming, we also challenged students to have Dash always facing the audience when he is saying something. This ...
The fourth graders at Lynhaven have been busy learning how to program the Dash robots and researching the 4 Regions of California. 4th grade teacher Andrea Tracy was a member of the Advanced STEAM/Tech Cohort this summer and was very excited to work on this pilot project with Dash. We started by talking about what is inside a robot and how they work. We then discussed that robots are special classmates and they need to be treated with respect. Some of the expectations that the students came up with were using nice words with Dash, giving him personal space, and being patient with him. We then had the fourth graders complete the puzzles in Dash Robot Driving School using the iPad App Blockly. The next day, students worked with their groups to measure and draw a map for Dash to lead a tour through their region. They had to use their measurement and conversion skills, since Dash only moves in increments of 10 centimeters. In each group, there was one student who was an expert in the...
Hi Julie! It was nice meeting you at the 21st CTA.
ReplyDelete- Kelcie