From the beginning of the year, students from Kindergarten through to Year 6 have been able to spend an hour every week with a designated teacher, participating in activities associated with robots during Digital Technology time.
Digital Technonolgy or STEM, is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — which in this case allowed students across all stages to learn hands on with robotic devices.
These activities have been accessible in this instance thanks to a Department of Education project called STEMshare and we have been fortunate enough to have been granted the use of a kit for Term 1. The kits include 20 robotic devices, 10 Lego kits and 20 iPads. These resources have allowed lessons to include robots including Lego WeDo kits, Blue Bots and Dash robots in a variety of learning environments.
Students are offered this opportunity to develop skills in a range of core skills through to high order thinking for complex problem solving. Being able to follow explicate instructions is crucial to begin lessons, before commencing groupwork with the robotic devices which allows creativity and varying solutions to complete tasks.
During these STEM education activities, students learn in a safe environment that allows them to potentially fail and then try again. STEM education stresses the value of failure as a learning exercise, which will enable students to embrace mistakes as part of the learning process. Many of the students ideas didn’t work initially and their response was, “Let’s try it again and see.” This type of attitude can be encouraged with STEM learning and allowing students to experiment and take risks during learning activities.
The school P&C has kindly already had positive discussions with the school to hopefully increase the resources available in the school for not only Digital Technology use, but importantly to increase accessibility of devices for classrooms on a daily basis.
