Among the changes that have taken place in education over the last few years, perhaps one of the largest and most significant ones has been the emergence of computer science. Some districts require students to take computer science courses and plenty of others make sure they get at least some exposure to it through electives or afterschool clubs.
We talked about a lot of these skills in last week’s Eduporium Weekly and now we are going to be discussing some of the ways they might be put to use. Jobs of the future could range anywhere from drone pilot to virtual reality creator. We simply don’t know what exactly lies ahead, but can do some things to help prepare students for anything.
Despite conscious efforts from school and educational leaders, it’s tough to get girls as interested in STEM as their male counterparts. In fact, a great deal of female students lose interest by the time they’re in third or fourth grade. Why this may be is anybody’s guess, but some of the top reasons include the belief that they’re not as qualified as males.
If you’ve heard of the Dash Robot from Wonder Workshop, you’ve most likely heard of the Dot! Small but mighty, the Dot is a responsive and interactive robot designed for students aged six and up. Though it may not be quite as popular as the Dash because it lacks its own motors, the Dot is still a great tool for introductory programming.
Bloxels is in a field of its own. Why? It empowers students as young as five years old to try their hand at video game design. Seriously, students from grades K-8 can build an entire video game from scratch with Bloxels’ blocks and gameboard! It’s a totally hands-on experience during which students use the different blocks to design layouts and games.
The Meccano Meccanoid G15KS is a personal robot kids can build from the ground up. With three ways to program, voice recognition, and smart device communication, the Meccanoid might just become their best robot friend ever! Once built, it towers at almost four feet tall (122 cm) and it comes with 1,014 parts, two hand tools, a battery, and more.
If you’ve ever explored our site (if you haven’t, now is a pretty good time), you’ve likely seen hundreds of different EdTech tools, including some for every single age group and ones that cover just about every STEM area imaginable. We’ve got a gift for each of the 15 days of techXmas and, hopefully, you can learn something, too.
The micro:bit measures 4cm by 5cm and is completely programmable. It has 25 LEDs that students can code to light up and display various images, numbers, and text, as well as two buttons, inputs, outputs, an accelerometer, and a magnetometer that each can be individually programmed.
Coding is a skill that’s going to be extremely relevant for everybody in the future and something that all students need to experience from the onset of their education. And, yes, this includes girls. For whatever reason—many of which we’ll get into later—girls seem to lack the same interest boys have in STEM education but we can do something about that.
We don’t care how. We just want to help teachers get kids coding. And what better time of the year to do so? We trust that everyone has been having a great CS Ed Week, but if you want to try some new things towards the end of it or carry it over into next week or even next year, we’ve got some suggestions for how you can do it.
