On the move

Through the generosity of  Chevron's Fuel Your School Program , I received six  Sphero Ollies  last fall. Over the school year my students and I have experimented with different apps to learn programming using the Ollies. The students were motivated to learning coding while using the Ollies. There is of course a level of frustration that comes with learning something new. Most of my fourth grade students were able to program the Ollies using the  Tickle app  on the iPads. There was a lot of moving forward at full speed and crashing into walls before they got the hang of it. I introduced the Ollies to the summer program students. I started with the older students. I discovered that some of them did not have enough experience with basic block coding. This made programming the Ollies very difficult for them. The easy solution was for them to work on  Code.org  to gain the coding experience they needed. The challenge came when the younger students really wanted an opportunity to us

Week 4 of our summer program started with straw rockets. Students explored how changing the nose of their rocket or the wings affected how far it would travel. With the help of an older student, we recorded the distance traveled by each rocket in a Google Sheet. We used this data later in the week for a math talk. We discussed how to organize the data to answer questions and make predictions about how far most rockets would travel. This math talk was mostly an introduction to data analysis but helped students what can be done with information they collect. Our week continued with building wind powered cars. This activity comes from  PBS.org . This activity has a high excitement level as students get to see their creations roll or even fly. As we have engaged in each of these activities it's been interesting to observe how students approach the engineering design process. Some students jump in with little to no instruction or models and are comfortable building and design

Our 4th week of the summer program was all about building towers. The students built towers from index cards, Q-tips, rubber bands, Legos, and playing cards. The constraints of the building projects changed each day. One day they were allowed to manipulate the cards by bending and using tape, other days they could not. As they worked with the variety of materials they learned about the properties of the materials and how to build with them. The students challenged themselves to build the tallest free standing tower possible. They tried to build their tower so that it stood taller than the tallest student. Along the way they discovered which structures were the most stable. Ideas for these building challenges came from  Educating Young Engineers  and  Teacher Web from Canyon Middle School . 

In our summer program, we mixed off-line and on-line engaging activities.  Prodigy , an on-line math game has proved to be very engaging to all of our students. The best part is that they love it and they are still working on their math skills. Win-win! Another engaging and consistent component of our program is an off-line, old fashioned book read aloud. Our youngest students are read to everyday. Our staff does an excellent job of asking the students questions and making connections to the stories with the students. The list of books we are reading this summer came from the KQED Mind/Shift blog. One of the blog entries included a list of picture books  that support spatial skills development. Another blog entry included  picture books  that have diverse characters. The students are enjoying the books and so are the adults who are reading them. We are all enjoying being learners together.

Boats, coding, robotic friends and circuits made learning fun on our short, second week of the summer program. Independence Day made for a short week of the summer program but we were still plenty busy. We designed and tested aluminum foil boats on Monday. We started testing the capacity of the boats with pennies and quickly ran out of pennies. We then used plastic sea creatures from our math curriculum. The record was 146 sea creatures in one boat! Our school has just been named as a  STEM Transformation School  by our school district. As part of our STEM transformation we will be expanding our implementation of  Project Lead the Way  curriculum. Projects like building simple boats from foil have helped to introduce the engineering design process to our students. Our kindergarten and fourth grade students experienced Project Lead the Way this past school year and we are excited to expand to all of our classrooms next school year. We continued our week with some cod