Engineering Week at Cannon!

Our big excitement for this week was getting started on Lego WeDo Robotics in class!  Some of the students have been looking forward to this for a long time.  After some introductory puzzles with Ms. Pettit during last Friday's rotations, we got started today building our first project: the lion!  Students followed onscreen directions with their partner, gathered the pieces and followed the steps to build the lion, including connecting it to the laptop.  Then they followed the directions to complete the drag-and-drop program on the screen.  Finally it was time to see if they were successful.  If they typed a on the keyboard, the lion sat up and roared.  If they typed b, it lay down and snored.  Many students had time to make a short video of their lion in action that you can watch on their iPads.  A few even finished with enough time left to modify the program and change the lion's actions or the sound effects.  Everyone was excited and left the media lab looking forward to our next robotics session!  

In these pictures you can see the process they went through and the finished lion.  Check out these looks of concentration as they work!

We had also listened to the story The Most Magnificent Thing earlier this week and created plans for inventions they would like to have to solve a problem of some sort.  Some of the ideas included a robot to bathe kids for parents, a toy washer to clean toys, a garbage picker so the garbage men don't have to pick up the bags themselves, a machine to make noises so little sisters or brothers wouldn't bother you, a freeze ray, a gravity gun, and a flying car.  Today we used Google Hangout to connect with Ms. Read's class at O. C. Taylor and both classes shared their ideas!

Our last big activity for Engineering Week will be some extra building and design time on Friday.  That should be a fun way to wrap a week of fun and learning!

We have read about some famous inventors, practiced the way engineers draw and label plans for their designs, created a design to solve a problem just like other inventors do, followed plans to build something, and tested and fixed things that were not working.  These are some of the things engineers do, but these are also skills that can be applied to anything students want to do in life!