Engineering Week in 1st Grade

During Engineering Week we had special events and activities every day and the students had a blast!  

We had a visiting engineer from Lockheed Martin who showed us some of the airplanes they design and told us about different kinds of engineering.  

We went to the media lab and had our first (and second) experience with Lego WeDo Robotics.  First the students followed the step-by-step instructions to get the correct pieces and build the structure.  Then they followed the instructions to create the coding to tell it to move.  Then they got to alter the coding to make it do something else on their own.  Everyone was successful on our first visit and there was a lot of enthusiasm for this activity.  We will return several times to build some of the other structures!

We went to the library for some special makerspaces activities including building a maze for a "brushbot", creating a car and testing it on a ramp, creating something that would catch the wind in the wind tunnel, and trying out a variety of hands-on electronic puzzles.  These activities were fast and left the kids wanting to do more!

Finally we got to experience Google Expeditions and visit places around the world with the 3D 360° images.  We saw animals in the San Diego zoo, Angel Falls, California's giant redwoods, the pyramids in Egypt, and some undersea creatures.  And all of this without ever leaving the school!  

Robotics and Engineering Excitement

We recently went to the learning commons area (formerly known as the library) to try some new robots and other engineering materials.  It was a VERY popular learning experience and will not be our last trip!

Here are some students hard at work using magnetic pieces to create a marble maze!  There is quite a bit of trial and error as students try to get it right.

These are the Dash robots.  Each one can do something different.  Programming one to drive a path on the floor or another one to play a tune was great learning fun!

Then we tried the little Ozbots that follow the colored lines on a surface to control where they move and what special things they can do.  Students used markers on paper to draw a pathway and tell their Ozbot to speed up, spin, or other commands.  We had a whole page of commands students could choose from.

Another station the students enjoyed was also using the Ozbots, but instead of using markers on paper to code the pathway, students used a drawing app on the iPad and the robots followed that path right on their screen!

All of these activities required students to plan ahead, check whether their plan was working, and revise to make things happen the way they intended.  The sequence of the instructions mattered and students had to pay attention to detail for things to work right.  Students are learning about different coding systems and about the way objects move and behave.  Some activities required negotiating with partners to complete the task and some were independent.  All of these skills will be useful in many areas of the curriculum and in real life!

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!

First Grade Excitement

We have had an exciting couple of days in 1st grade! On Thursday we  got a betta fish for our class.  We reviewed the needs of living things and how we would provide for those needs as we got his aquarium set up.  We did a bit of research to learn more about betta fish.  Many names were suggested, and after a vote the winning name was Penny.  Penny is currently enjoying his new home in our class.  He will be one of our references as we learn more about living things in science.

Friday morning in math students enjoyed a math treasure hunt.  They used their iPads to scan QR codes, solved math problems, and found that answer to scan the next QR code.  When they had solved all their math problems, the last QR code led to a fun music video as a reward.  In our next math units we will be learning about geometry and fractions!  More math fun lies ahead.

Then Friday afternoon during our Create Time, we went to the media lab for our first robotics lesson.  Students worked in pairs to follow the directions on the laptops and build a Lego lion.  Then they practiced some coding skills to program it to stand up and lie down.  This was a very popular activity and we will definitely go back for more robotics!  Here is a short video of how it moved and some more photos of hard working engineers: