We’re once again excited to reveal the recipient of our latest EdTech grant and the awardee for the month of July is Heather Russell! Heather is a STEAM teacher from Ecoff Elementary in the Chesterfield (VA) County Public Schools. She is working hard to bring more coding and robotics opportunities to the students in the 39 elementary schools in her district and we’re more than happy to be able to reward her hard work and excellent application! Despite many of the older students in the district taking regular part in STEM, Heather noticed that appropriate STEM activities for the elementary kids were lacking and, knowing that they need these experiences just as much, it led her to apply for our grant.

We’ll be providing Heather and her students with some various coding and robotics tools that are perfect for getting her elementary students more engaged with STEM. Among the technologies she’ll be receiving include items from Wonder Workshop, Sphero, and Edison Robot. Not only will Heather be using these tech tools to help teach coding and computational thinking at an early age, she also wants to launch a district-wide robotics competition at the elementary level! We think this is a fantastic idea to promote STEM development and, of course, to encourage kids to have fun, collaborate, and learn!

Heather and other teachers in the district are trying to promote the importance of coding as much as possible. Knowing that it helps students develop the ability to problem solve, enrich their creativity, and collaborate, it’s easy for her to see how learning this key skill ties in with future job readiness. In the coding programs she’s a part of, Heather regularly strives to promote critical and creative thinking among her students, too. While the older students in the district have programs like VEX and FIRST Robotics to participate in and develop these abilities, Heather will now be better able to help younger students build computer science skills as well.

In her vision, Heather wants each elementary school to be able to create two sets of teams—one for second and third graders and one for fourth and fifth graders. Based on their preferences and what’s available, the teams will choose from programming with Sphero, Wonder Workshop, or Edison and work together to complete a specified challenge. By combining elements of both engineering and coding, Heather’s vision for this robotics competition has us excited to see how it turns out and for the learning that her students will get to experience! She even expects to have judges with detailed rubrics to score each team! 

The students will use their new robotics tools both in preparation for the robotics competition and on the day they’re competing. This will give them as much time as possible to practice coding and see how programs that they build are able to control the robot’s movements, expressions, and actions. Heather will also be focusing on troubleshooting during this entire process and encouraging kids to use their STEM skills in solving any problems that arise whether it’s related to the robot’s hardware or the code they create—the kind of debugging practice that’s great preparation for the real world!

The students who choose to participate will be able to begin practicing with their robots once the new school year starts in preparation for the main competition, which will take place this coming March. Each participating school will have a teacher or two sponsor these students and work with them to prepare. Hopefully, this can help build some additional interest and lead to more participation as STEM programs in the elementary schools evolve. Heather is hoping to have a few hundred elementary students taking part and even bring some of the older students in to coach them!

To keep up with the progress of her initiative, be sure to follow us on Twitter, where we will share updates! We wish Heather and her students the best of luck in this great program and can’t wait to see how it turns out. If you would like to apply for our $500 EdTech grant for the month of August, the application is now open. It will remain open until Aug. 20 and we will select the awardee at the end of the calendar month. If you have any questions about the grant we offer, please feel free to get in touch with us!