Today, I was able to work with Katherine Sutton of Davies Career and Technical High School in Lincoln, RI.
What better way to spend an afternoon then to geek out in a robotics lab with students teaching me about their coding? Me asking questions about what formulas they are using in order to code their robots to meet the challenge of stopping at various distances. Students worked together, were welcoming and focused on meeting various challenges.
There are now several schools interested in collaborating on SeaPerch. These range from High Schools in Smithfield and Lincoln to Middle Schools in Jamestown and Scituate.
We are working to link classrooms and potentially design our own competition. Building community and expanding STEM in Rhode Island are motivating us to find new ways to have students engage in real world engineering design and work with varied groups of thinkers.
The classrooms that I visited are designed more like work-spaces; students moving about based on need for support or space.
Katherine and I are excited to provide opportunities for our students to collaborate!! Her seniors are redesigning their robots and we hope to have them present to my 6th graders!
In addition, we are hoping to find a way for the high school students, now soldering experts, be the volunteers for middle school students as they learn to solder circuit boards!! We are working to find ways to fund the transportation of the experts to our site.
Conversely, we may be able to travel up to Lincoln and practice in their pool, while at the same time learning from some of the student experts.
I previously had the pleasure of sharing SeaPerch with Liz Rusillo, of Smithfield High School, who teaches engineering and design. We talked about possibilities of using ROVs in her program, as well as joining forces with other teachers around the state.
Exciting things are happening!
