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| Image: Emily Haddon |
CHVE STEM Lab
What STEM activities are students doing at CHVE? Each month, come here to take a peek. Visit our tools: CHVE Links.
PARENTS: Visit this fantastic site that reviews movies, games/apps, and promotes responsible use of technology at home.
For the months of: Nov-Dec, 2014
Kindies - Our little guys started learning how to apply programming logic in code.org. Try this at home:
Kindies - Our little guys started learning how to apply programming logic in code.org. Try this at home:
- Mrs. Thomas' class
- Mrs. Barsch's class
1st Grade
- Dance Mat Mondays! Students practice proper typing technique by completing one stage.
- Engineering & Design with Lego's: In this week's project, students developed a simple fan and tested it's success. This was followed by an exploration in gears. Students were then tasked with using their knowledge of gears to come up with a way to make their fans spin faster. It was amazing to see what kids came up with. Click here to see an example. Most of their work was documented using Wixie.
- Through the course of a week, students participated in "Hour of Code"... First, students logged into their "Code Accounts" by visiting our Learning Links and scrolling to the bottom of the page. Here students are able to learn at their own pace and solve problems by applying logic using object oriented programming. Students extended this exploration in programming logic by learning a bit about Scratch. Finally, students concluded the week with the iPad app, Kodable.
- Dance Mat Mondays!
- Remember these days? Sitting at home on a Saturday in front of a 300 lb TV with a screen size that was 18"x18"? You jammed the cartridge into the Atari Console for the 3rd time cause the screen kept flickering. When you finished, you walked around shaking your wrist cause you jammed the joy stick up in order for it to work at least 3 out of every 5 times. Ahh, the classics were great. It was time to bring this back. Student were given a week-and-a-half to create a single-player verison of this game using the program Scratch. Students did a great job and all their work was saved to the web to access anywhere. As Scratch is a public Web-app, this gave us the opportunity to cover the value of being extremely careful with identity.
4th Grade
5th Grade
- Makey Makey Mini Fair! Students were introduced to our new set of Makey Makey kits. Students used these kits "to turn everyday objects into an interactive touchpad". Our key concepts for the week: open and closed ciruits. Their imagination ran wild as they created everything from working cardboard piano's to video game controllers. At the end of the week, students "toured" the room to interact with the ideas of their peers. Our own little Makey-Fair!
- During their second week, students were given the opportunity to work with SketchUp, google's 3-Dimensional design program. Used most frequently for architecture, students were charged with the task of designing a doghouse while getting to know how to interact with a VERY difficult piece of software. We modeled our work from YouTube video's. If they can master a few basic functions in SketchUp, they will have the opportunity to turn their own design into reality using our MakerBot!
- Students spent one week programming in Scratch. Their options for designing included: story creation, animation, game with multiple levels, maze game, Pong, target games, and scrolling games (like Super Mario Bros). Those with something proud to share posted their work to the CHVE Studio where they all could comment and "favorite" each other's work. This lent itself to the perfect opportunity for learning about responsible online behavior.
- Lego Robotics + Scratch = 1 amazing week! This was by far one of the most exciting weeks. Students took their Scratch skills from the previous week and integrated them into the world of Legos. In this week, through the motors and hubs from the Lego Wedo sets, students participated in a variety of Lego builds with the purpose of operating them from the Scratch website. One group designed a race car that was programmed to move forward and backward on the ground. The students in this group added to their programming to make their Lego car move forward/backward if math questions were answered correctly/incorrectly on the screen. The goal was to get the Lego race car to the finish line (a piece of tape laid across the ground) Amazing creativity. Can't wait for what the next week will bring!
