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.
The Ozobot Bit Robot was a longtime go-to STEM solution for teaching all about coding, robotics, computational thinking, and problem solving. Now that the Bit has been retired for a few years, however, you may want to try to upgrade. Its successor, the Ozobot Evo, continues to enable educators to teach CS lessons with its significant upgrades, like Bluetooth capability.
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.
The mBot-S is one elementary robotics tool that’s perfect for students who want to build a robot before coding. For any educators throughout the K–8 grades, it’s a great tool for incorporating STEAM experiences into activities that highlight creative development as kids enjoy valuable experience with engineering and collaborating while building a real robot from scratch.
Last week, at the Boston Museum of Science, their Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) initiative hosted a panel on Women in AI. The panelists discussed the need for added diversity in AI and the significance of ethical issues surrounding how people use artificial intelligences. They also added their insights on how to use AI tools effectively and safely in the classroom.
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.
