The current state of education is, of course, crucial to the future success of today’s students. They need innovative learning opportunities and creative challenges that will help them succeed down the road. What’s equally important in education is what’s on tap next. As a whole, education needs to be continuously evolving to best prepare students.
We say this all the time but a makerspace could be anything you want it to be. Seriously, there is no right or wrong way to design a makerspace. They now often pop up in classrooms, libraries, community centers, basements, closets, or wherever there’s room. The important thing is that students can work with their hands and create something meaningful.
While it may not be as bad as it was once thought to be, there will almost certainly be jobs lost to technology. While there will likely be jobs created in their place, however, there is no denying that technologies like artificial intelligence will have their place in our lives. They are already very much in it, in fact, with services like Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
With this charismatic robot and accompanying app, students can play games, chat, control, and program the Cue in Blockly or JavaScript. They can even pick one of four avatars to represent and track their progress: Charge, Zest, Smirk, and Pep! Each avatar is preprogrammed with unique personalities, expressions, and interactions.
This Fourth of July, we decided to experiment with Bare Conductive’s Touch Board to help spark an interest in circuitry among our readers. The Touch Board is a limitless interface at the heart of some of Bare Conductive’s most innovative STEAM tools. Using it, students can turn touch into sound with the help of conductive materials.
Back in June, we announced a new educational technology grant program to award $500 of STEM tools to one deserving recipient every month. Our selection committee met this week and awarded the first grant to Melinda Pastuszak, a teacher with the Chamberlayne Elementary School (Virginia). Mindy is in the process of planning the launch of a new STEAM program!
As we know, STEM has evolved to STEAM, adding art to the mix (as well as some other variations). Technology can be a great way for students to enhance their art classes using tools like conductive paint, virtual reality, or more. It can also be used in music classes, though, creating interactive, exciting, and real world experiences.
Inventing things is a great way for children to blossom into STEAM superstars. Never running out of things to invent is a whole different experience. The littleBits Pro Library is new and improved, providing creative students with enough parts to design intricate inventions or colossal creations.
In this week’s Eduporium Experiment, we are taking a deeper look at Stikbot and its potential to enrich hands-on education in the early grades. Besides being an entertaining, posable toy that allows kids to use stop motion animation anywhere, it’s also a great way for them to learn to work in small groups, problem solve, and more.
It pays to have a friend with a makerspace and, using this connection, we put on a day of PD for 30 teachers at Pinky Inc. in Marlborough, MA. At the day-long workshop, the teachers worked together and designed some creative classroom activities centered on STEM tools, like Sphero, E-Blox, Cubetto, and more!
