There are, of course, many different pedagogical approaches that can lead to effective instruction. These days, teachers might be fond of promoting a growth mindset, a maker mindset, or perhaps even instilling a collaborative mindset in children. Whatever buzzwords we toss around, however, they’re only as effective as the purposeful teaching techniques that result.
These days, not only can instructors utilize robotics tools to teach students coding and computational thinking skills, a lot of them have an engineering element within them as well. We think it’s great that educators and children can combine these two key areas of STEM by first building their robot (like any of these five prime examples) and then programming its functions.
There truly is an endless number of elements to computer science and, as time has gone on, educational robotics solutions have evolved to help our teachers illustrate so many key coding concepts with various avenues for students to develop these skills. So, while some are designed for EarlyEd students (as early as Pre–K), others are complex enough for high school.
The Strawbees Classroom platform is now accessible to any educator, and the Strawbees team has made a bunch of improvements to the LMS. Now, teachers can try a giant library of Strawbees example activities, share their own project guides, and directly assign new challenges. With access to the portal, engineering and exploration in elementary STEM is much easier.
We now have so many unique teaching styles and strategies for effectively communicating curricular content to your kids, including teacher-centered, student-centered, self-paced, competency-based, and even inquiry-based models among others. Then, there is culturally responsive teaching, which involves shifting instruction and language for kids from different cultures.
Career readiness can mean any number of different things—especially as it pertains to today’s education landscape. As you know, students may move on to college, attend trade schools, or begin working right after completing high school. Thanks to career and technical education programs, however, many students can learn viable skills and quickly begin a relevant career.
Quizlet Live is a collaborative classroom game that your students can play together from their own devices. They could use it in the same classrooms or when studying from home—perfect for accommodating review efforts at all different times. To get started with Quizlet Live, teachers can just create a Quizlet account and they’ll get a Quizlet Live code to share with kids.
There are typically two primary options for younger kids (or older students) to get started with coding: either physical tools or digital tools. Most of our expertise involves the physical coding tools, including educational robotics kits, circuitry solutions, or even programmable drones. Especially following the remote learning era, however, there are also strictly virtual platforms.
If you are familiar with Wordle, the Oodle math game is very similar. Instead of guessing those 5-letter words without much context, however, kids have to build out an equation that’ll work with the answer they were given. So, if the answer to a puzzle is 41, they’d have to figure out all other elements to the equation in six or fewer tries, challenging their brain as they learn math.
When educators can work to simultaneously engage their students’ heads, hearts, and hands in projects—something they could really accelerate with MakerEd tools—they often develop vital SEL skills more quickly while also preparing for future careers. So, what are these key social-emotional skills and what are some of the ways in which educators can teach them?
