As we do every month, we’ve selected a recipient for our $500 EdTech grant award for the month of April. The awardee is Ashley Alden, a teacher at Dayton Heights Elementary in Los Angeles, California. We really loved Ashley’s application and how she got the inspiration for the project she wants to work on with her students. Centered on bringing an engaging and community-focused makerspace into their school, Ashley believes that the power of collaborative STEAM projects can help transform the educational experiences her kids take part in.
The source of Ashley’s inspiration when applying for our grant was a unique one and we’re glad to have been able to reward this ingenuity. In the Los Angeles area, there is a young boy, who has become somewhat famous for his creative and maker skills. The boy’s father owns an auto body shop and this particular boy would collect any scraps or materials that he could find lying around within the shop. With them, he built his very own functional arcade game and his drive, perseverance, and maker mindset helped inspire a number of teachers at Dayton Heights Elementary, including, of course, Ashley.
Like the boy near their school, many of Ashley’s students don’t always have access to the latest resources for their learning. So, she wants to show them that makerspaces don’t have to be state of the art or cost a whole lot as long as they inspire fun and cultivate creativity. Ashley really wants to focus on project-based learning and the challenge she’s planning on posing to her students will go something like this: How can you and your partners create a game that is fun, innovative, and challenging for your peers? Students will work together to find the best answer in their school’s makerspace.
Going forward, Ashley expects her students to have access to the school’s makerspace at least three times per week and, while there, they’ll be able to use any materials they can find (sound familiar?) to design and build. Ashley wants them to focus on developing skills related to physics, engineering, and electronics as well as how they could integrate these skills into all of their classes, including social studies and ELA. She also sees this as a good opportunity to teach some soft skills, like systemic thinking, design thinking, and critical thinking, which should definitely benefit each of her students going forward.
From now until the fall, students will have the chance to work on their own arcade style games and fine tune their looks and functionality as they go. In the fall, they’ll be holding an Autumn Festival, during which students will present their games to the community. Typically, the school rents carnival style games for the event, but, in Ashley’s vision, the arcade games her students create will be able to replace these—an incredibly creative idea! She hopes that the chance to work together on such a fun project and the promise of being able to present it to the community will help create a learning experience for these students that’s great for letting them showcase their engineering, creativity, and design skills.
To help her students build their arcade games, we are going to be awarding Ashley some MakeDo kits and accessories, the Snap Circuits Arcade Kit, some KEVA Planks, and some Chibitronics Starter Stickers. As of right now, she anticipates using the MakeDo parts to build the arcade games and the Circuit Stickers to decorate them and light them up! As for the KEVA Planks and Snap Circuits, Ashley is thinking that they will help her students explore concepts related to physics and engineering and allow them to create prototypes of their arcade games to see what works and what doesn’t.
Ultimately, Ashley hopes, first and foremost, to increase her students’ engagement in STEAM learning through these fun activities and challenges. She also hopes that the real-world, experiential learning they’ll be taking part in leads to a boost in both achievement and test scores. Being located in a low-income section of Los Angeles, she understands that many parents cannot contribute to providing students with innovative learning opportunities despite the fact that they need them to better prepare for real-world success. That’s why we’re so thrilled to be able to help with this project and provide some of the technology that her students can use to have fun while learning together and building a foundation for future success!
Ashley should be receiving her technology from us soon and her students are eager to get started on their arcade games. If you’d like to be in the running for our grant award in the month of May, the application is now open and will remain open until May 20. We encourage everyone to apply for the grant. In the meantime, be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for more EdTech updates and inspiration.