Go beyond technical education to help students flourish

Key points:

Educators often focus on how well robotics in education can prepare students for careers in Stem fields. And that is true and important. Robotics is an attractive way of starting students' interest in technical fields and, According to the Office of Labor StatisticsIt is projected that Stem works grow three times and half faster than non -stem jobs.

However, the lessons learned in the robotics classroom are applicable to any work and life in general. Students learn persistence and resistance, teamwork and collaboration, and problem solving skills. We have seen students in our classes find their own voices and learn to advocate themselves. Robotics is also a great vehicle for cross -curricular experiences that give life to the concepts that students learn in other classes when using them in practical situations.

It is also true that while leading a programming class can feel intimidating for teachers with few technical history, robotics projects can be successfully facilitated by any teacher and students can even take together with the right resources. At school for talented and equipped in pleasant Grove, we taught a variety of robotics and programming courses despite the fact that only one of us had previous experience in related areas.

This is how we use robotics to involve students, teach a variety of soft and technical skills, and not waste all our time for lesson planning.

Rooted in competition

Two or three years ago, we changed the focus of our classrooms to help students learn all the basic concepts of engineering to competition. When we learn about team proportions, for example, we could do it by making students compete to win a strip and loosen competition or a robotic game of great struggle. The competition is excellent for involving students and, naturally, encourages collaboration within the teams. Perhaps the most important thing is that students give students a sense of pride in the work they do in our classrooms.

It also forces our students to develop resilience and become opposite thinkers. As they try new ideas and fail, and try a little more information, they are learning to follow a challenge, even when they seem to be progressing little, and begin to think critically about what they could try next and the different ways in which it could also fail.

Project -based lessons

Because robotics lessons are often based on projects, particularly when rooted in competition or gamified, tend to bring concepts and ideas of disparate fields or even students' own life experiences. They learn to apply physics in our robotics classes when they use what they have learned about balanced and unbalanced forces to their high robots designs. When they are calculating angles to discover the optimal path for their robot, they are using the mathematics they have recently learned in the real world, answering for themselves the ancient question of mathematics students: “When are we going to use this?”

Every day in our robotics classes, we are reinforcing the learning of students from the entire curriculum deeply practically.

Students also learn processes that can be applied widely beyond robotics simply by administering their own projects. The projects we use see with guides the students follow each step of a project, including the creation of an initial design, collect comments on it, add accessibility characteristics, create a final design and then present their products and results finished to their classmates.

We have also discovered that improving rigor for students with a little more technical knowledge is easy with the correct program. We have many students who are eager to learn about programming and go to our class with a certain knowledge of Scratch, for example, and it is easy for us to adapt projects to ensure that they are challenging for technologically early students while still being accessible to those who just begin their coding trip.

Simplified planning

As the only programming teachers in our school, we were worried about time planning. One of us teaches five different programming courses and the other had limited training in programming. We have an hour to plan to prepare for all these classes, so we are grateful to have a supplementary resource that provides everything we need to begin. We use Coderz because it aligns well with our competitive, multi-curricular and project-based programming approach.

It is so easy to implement that teachers without a history can jump directly to teaching, and students can even take over and lead their classmates.

It is a joy to see the emotion on the faces of our students as they begin to deepen each new project, but it is not rival for the satisfaction of seeing their confidence to grow as their technical and social skills flourish throughout the year.