Submitted by Quin Charity
The third-grade students have been having a fantastic time in STEM! We started our time together learning how to use Seesaw, an app where students can document their work. Learning how to document their work is important because it fosters pride in their work and promotes organization and planning. Next, students used Blockly through Code.org’s Hour of Code, learning to problem-solve as they continued to encounter coding challenges. After that, students have had several building and team challenges, one of them being the Marshmallow Tower Challenge.
Currently, they are learning how to collaborate in our Building a Vehicle unit. The overall goal is to have a partnership (or trio) design, build, and code vehicles that they have built. They are learning about gears, documenting their process, and revising their cars. They will probably have to create at least three versions before they achieve successful motor and movement function, and they will! Right now, they are in the middle of figuring out if their first versions with motors and gears will work. Next, they will learn how to code and will learn the basics of coding, using WeDo 2.0.
Through STEM it is important that the students develop resilience, cooperation, and collaborative skills, as those skills are essential factors of future academic and career success. We may not know what their careers and lives may be like in the next 20 years, but we do know this: Being able to work with a team, being able to learn from, deal with, and recover from failures is important. It has been great to see the students trying and trying again, at first getting frustrated but then attaining design breakthroughs. As one student said, “If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try, try AGAIN!”
