Google Comes to Town

There was a buzz in the air at New Century Middle School on Thursday, February 15th.  Some might think students were still jittery from a candy-heart sugar high.  While that may have had a little to do with it, the real show was in Mr. Clothier's Art classroom.  Dr. Susan Jinks, a Career and Technical Education teacher at New Century, signed up for a demonstration of the Google Expedition Pioneer Program.  Students were able to check out the latest in Augmented Reality using Asus Zenfone devices attached to selfie-sticks.

What is Augmented Reality?  If you have ever used a Snapchat filter to put Puppy ears on your profile picture, you have used Augmented Reality(AR).  AR uses live digital images layered over your view of the real world.  In the picture below, students were viewing the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) through the camera on the device.

The different tours visited today included Forces of Nature, The Solar System, Ancient Rome, Ecosystem of a Coral Reef, World War I, DNA and RNA.  Students were able to navigate all angles of objects that were super-imposed on their view of the classroom.  Some students even went as far as getting on the floor to see the underside of objects.  Below, two students tried to get a better view of the underside of an octopus from the Coral Reef Ecosystem tour.

The video below is from Google's YouTube page and shows what the kids today were able to experience.  Google Expeditions is a great way for teachers to bring the world into the classroom and expose students to things they may not have a chance to experience otherwise.  

The Google Expedition Pioneer app is still in Beta so it is not available in app stores.  A list of the available tours can be found here.

If you are interested in bringing this type of experience to your school, sign up here.

Tyler Callahan
@STEM_TC
jcallahan@ncmcs.org

The Elementary DIF's take a trip to the Virginia Children's Engineering Convention

   A week ago the elementary Digital Integration Facilitators (DIF's) of Moore County were fortunate enough to attend the Virginia Children's Engineering Convention (VCEC) in Roanoke, Virginia. The conference celebrated the innovative ideas in regards to STEM and offered a variety of sessions on tools to use in the engineering classroom. We gathered many new resources and various ideas on how to better integrate STEM education into the everyday classroom.

   In Moore County, we are already doing a lot of STEM practices and education in the K-12 classroom. We have developed an engineering thread that perfectly aligns with teachers' pacing guides K-8, and many teachers appreciate the impact this type of learning has on their students. Many of the K-5 educators in Moore County, have branched out to seek other STEM activities to do with their students. As a DIF, that is what you strive for! We want our teachers to be vested in this type of learning, see the value, and start adopting these practices on their own. 

On May 4, beginning teachers will have an opportunity to visit our robotics showcase at Pinecrest High School and see STEM education at its finest. In addition, we also will host a digital learning showcase at Vass-Lakeview Elementary School on March 15 from 6-7:30pm. It is because of terrific conferences such as the VCEC that Moore County continues to pave the way for STEM education. I know the DIF's are eager to try out their newly acquired material from the conference and share with their fellow teachers.

~Deanna Boesch

What STEM education looks like in Mrs. DeMestre's 5th Grade Class

   STEM education and engineering are a growing area for elementary classrooms. Many schools and districts across the United States are adopting a STEM program and are encouraging the development of STEM skills. At Pinehurst Elementary School, in Moore County, Mrs. DeMestre is a 5th grade teacher that has fully adopted the use of STEM education! She uses STEM/engineering to enhance her students' understanding of various concepts. If you are wanting to adopt a STEM program in your classroom, check out the responses of Mrs. DeMestre and her students.

   Introducing the engineering design process and letting your kids learn through play and experimentation can be scary at first. It is an entirely different approach to teaching. Below are some responses from Mrs. DeMestre and her students on how they handle this challenge!

1.) What does STEM/Engineering in your classroom look like?

"Chaos... in the absolute best sense of the word! Among the inevitable clutter of supplies and building materials, it looks like collaboration and critical thinking at its finest. Students are engaged in small group conversations aimed at tackling challenges and finding creative solutions." 

2.) What do you and your kids like most about STEM/Engineering in the classroom?

"What I love most about STEM in our classroom is the innovation. I am always impressed by the variety of approaches to reach a common goal." 

   

   Even though there are the inevitable challenges that come with providing this type of education in your classroom, there are also sweet rewards. Not only are students engaged and focused on the task, but STEM challenges foster the use of higher order thinking and application skills. As educators we always want our students to learn, but to enjoy the process of learning. Mrs. DeMestre's 5th graders have fully endorsed the use of STEM/engineering in their classroom. One student reports, "I love building things and being challenged." Another student says that, "STEM challenges teach us to look at a problem in a different way." "You can be creative", and "having to build on a budget because we get to do math" are only some of the many positive responses to this type of learning. 

3.) Do STEM/Engineering lessons enhance your students understanding of concepts taught? If so, how?

"STEM lessons definitely enhance students' understand of concepts taught. Each phase of the engineering process requires students to dig deeper and apply what they know. One of the most powerful aspects of the lesson is the "Improve" segment, when students are asked to make revisions for improvement." 

4.) Would you recommend to other teachers the use of STEM in their classroom? If so, why?

"Absolutely! STEM is an opportunity for failures and feats to be equally valued. In our classroom we say, "Mistakes are expected, respected, inspected and corrected." Celebrating failure is critical in our endeavor to grow risk-takers." 

5.) What is your favorite memory of a STEM/Engineering lesson in your class?

"It is impossible to choose just one favorite memory... LEGO Story Starters are always a huge hit! I love being able to incorporate STEM into our Social Studies curriculum. We use the LEGO Story Starter kits to design scenes depicting major causes of the American Revolution."

With STEM education the opportunities are endless! We are producing independent, inquiring, and critical thinking minds that will expand our future as a nation. The process can be messy and it requires an all hands on deck approach; however, your students and school with reap the benefits of providing this type of learning environment.

~Deanna Boesch

FLL Rookie Experience Reflection and Tips

Four years into our robotics experience in Moore County Schools, Clint Rogers and I decided to take our robotics game to the next level.  We picked one of our schools to go into this new experience with and we both came away learning a lot. We didn’t realize exactly how much time and effort this new commitment would require, but given the opportunity we would participate in First League League every season that it’s offered.

What is FLL?

First Lego League is an international robotics competition for students from grades fourth through eighth, but it is so much more than robots.  This competition is made up of 3 distinctive parts in which students are judged: Project, Robot Game, and Core Values.

During the course of the season, students research a topic, develop a plan, and present their project to an outside party.  This year’s theme was Hydrodynamics - so everything was centered around water.  Students collaborated with field experts and university professors before deciding on a course of action and coming up with the topic they wanted.  Once they decided on their project they had to come up with entertaining ways to present it to judges (song, skit, ect).

The robot game has a challenge board with several challenges and each challenge is worth a set amount of points.  Student have 2 ½ minutes to execute as many of the challenges as possible.  They compete in 3 rounds and they keep the best score out of the 3 rounds.   Students are also judged on how well they have modified their EV3 robot in order to perform the tasks in the robot design category.

Core Values is portion of the competition where teams show they can work together and value each other’s input.  During this event, students are given a task or a challenge that they must work together to solve and they are judged on how they teamwork.  **Below you can see we played reverse musical chairs as a practice exercise - students had to try to work together to get ALL team members on fewer and fewer chairs each round.  

Teams aren't just judged at an FLL competition in the four judging spaces, they are watched throughout the competition day by judges to see if they are showing gracious professionalism, sharing what they have learned with other teams, and displaying an understanding that learning is more important than winning. Below you’ll find a picture of the pit where teams are staged in between events. Bring snacks! There is plenty of downtime.

How is it different than what Moore County is doing with robotics?

At the elementary level we have a county and regional competition.  This competition consists of four, twenty minute  rounds of programming and EV3 robot to navigate a board/path for points using various sensors.  The challenge is that students have not seen these boards before.  

How do I get started with FLL?

First you need a team of no more than 10 students and you need to register your team nationally.  You can do that here. This comes with an annual team registration fee of $225. The field kit (which is different each year to coincide with the theme) costs $75 plus shipping. Then you will need to build a board so your team can practice - instructions here. This summer you will need to order your lego pieces for practice - they did not release this year until August 29.  Then in mid October, register for a qualifying tournament- cost is $75.

Rookie Tips and things we learned this year:

• Programming with cables on a computer is most dependable. It is do-able on a chromebook but the software is much more robust on a computer.  
• Having a reliable parent volunteer is a MUST and a requirement to compete
• Each team member needs to be knowledgeable about the robot and program as well as the project - you never know which team member will get asked questions.
• Collaboration with other coaches that have FLL experience proved to be very valuable.

Neither of our teams walked away this season with any awards but “What we discover is more important than what we win” (this being one of the eight core values that your team should remember). If you are considering diving into FLL next season and have questions, please reach out to us and we will be happy to help you!

Kelly Priest  - kpriest@ncmcs.org  

Clint Rogers - crogers@ncmcs.org

Engineering in the Winter Olympics

Friday, February 9th marks the beginning of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. We'll have 242 athletes representing the United States in the winter games competing for gold, silver, and bronze medals. There will be millions of us following the games closely and cheering on the American athletes. One of my favorite events to watch is bobsledding, so I was immediately hooked when I heard about Brooke Brown's bobsled engineering challenge!

If you're not following Brooke Brown, you should stop what you're doing and look her up immediately. She shares a ton of fantastic ideas for integrating STEM into the classroom. Her Teach Outside the Box blog is one of my favorites.

In her bobsled engineering challenge, students first enjoy the book Tacky and the Winter Games where Tacky and his companions train to represent Nice Icy Land in different winter events. One of which being the bobsled-less race. This event is the perfect opportunity for your students to get their engineering on! Using only aluminum foil, 2 straws, 2 toothpicks, a few pieces of tape, scissors and a piece of poster board, challenge your students to create their own bobsled for Tacky!

You can connect this challenge to your math curriculum by requiring your students to measure the distance their bobsled travels using standard or non-standard units of measurement. They could even create a class graph using the data from each team's distance traveled. Brooke has tons of resources to go along with this lesson including vocabulary cards, anchor charts, and nonfiction research that you can pick up from Teachers Pay Teachers here.

This is a great STEM activity to get your students excited about the Winter Olympics. Just make sure Tacky doesn't tumble out of his bobsled!

Shout out to Mrs. Robledo for sharing this idea!

-Clint

Three Schools, One Team: Northern Moore Middle FTC Team

If you’ve been keeping up with the Moore County EV3 Robotics Competitions for the past few years then you’d know that the Northern Moore Area middle schools are a force to be reckoned with.  In fact, Westmoore Elementary has won first place in the middle school competition for the past two years.  With the increase in student success in our local competitions and the continuous development of their computer programming skills, six of our Northern Moore Area middle school students will be taking their talents to the next level in robotics, First Tech Challenge (FTC).

For this post, guest bloggers and Robo Colts team members Lindy Wiseman (Westmoore), Annievette Camcho (Elise), and River Seawell (Highfalls) share their FTC journey so far. 

Team #13780 Robo Colts is a rookie FTC Team consisting of students in 6th, 7th and 8th grade.  Our team is a combined team of three students from Elise, two students from Highfalls K-8, and one student from Westmoore K-8, all located in the Northern Moore area of Moore County Schools.  All club members have at least two years of experience with Lego EV3 Robotics and have competed in the Moore County Schools robotic competitions.  

In FTC,  we work as a team to build and make modifications to the programming and structure of the robot.   The most challenging thing about FTC is coming up with new ideas to fix problems.  Since we come from three different schools, transportation to the meetings has also been challenging.  Luckily, our team members from Westmoore and Highfalls were able to ride the bus to Elise with the athletic teams, but if there was no sports practice, then we wouldn’t have transportation, and that was very frustrating.     

Our first practice was on October 17th.  We practiced once a week and sometimes twice a week if we had transportation.  We competed in Moore County School’s Winter Warriors competition on December 15th.  With only a couple of month’s to build a robot, learn how to program it, and learn how to drive it, we felt nervous and unsure of how we would do in the competition.

On the day of the competition, we did not feel confident because we were competing against people who have been in FTC for a couple of years and had more experience than us. During the interview, we were nervous about speaking in front of the judges, but we were confident in our engineering notebook and our robot design.

When we started the competition we felt discouraged because our controller broke and our robot started acting up.  Luckily, we were able to borrow a controller from another team.  When we had our first round, we started feeling more confident because we were able to successfully stack multiple glyphs. As the rounds went on we felt even more confident because we continued to do well, and we were even the first team to successfully accomplish autonomous mode, which is where the robot drives itself according to code written by our team programmers Lindy and Alex.  From this competition we learned that it takes a lot of teamwork to be successful.

A big part of FTC is gracious professionalism.  Gracious professionalism is a way of doing things that value others, respects individuals as well as the community, it also communicates and encourages high-quality work. At Winter Warriors we demonstrated gracious professionalism by helping another team find the parts they needed when their robot malfunctioned. We learned from other teams that we need to have a diverse skill set within our own team. An example of this would be that our programmers could also drive the robot, and the drivers would be able to program. As a young team, we enjoyed competing with older students that we could learn from.

The competition was very close, and we were excited to be one of the two teams competing in the championship round! The final round was very close, and our team and our alliance, Union Pines High School were one point away from first place! When the winners were announced, we were were very surprised to be named the winners of the Think Award, the award for best interview, engineering notebook, and overall gracious professionalism!

On Saturday, January 27th we will compete in the NC FTC Qualifier in Durham.  We are most looking forward to getting to meet other teams and see their techniques with their robot.  This may be our first year of FTC but we are confident in ourselves as well as our team. No matter what happens at the competition we will always be there to support our team as well as others.

We have enjoyed participating in FTC this year, and we are thankful for receiving the FTC Rookie Grant that provided the funding for our robot. Being on this team has allowed us to build friendships with our teammates from other schools, as well as learn more about the importance of working together.  We are thankful for this opportunity and cannot wait to get to work for next year!

-Lindy, Annie, River

The Robo Colts members with the Think Award: River Seawell, Alex Simpson (Elise), Lindy Wiseman, Neil Seawell (Highfalls), Caleb Sexton (Elise), Annievette Camcho.

The Northern Moore Middle Robo Colts are coached by DIFs Will Allred and Carrie Robledo.  For more information about FTC, check out their website: https://www.ncfllandftc.com/what-is-firstreg-tech-challenge.html

Make sure to follow me on Twitter (@carrierobledo) for updates on Saturday’s competition!

-Carrie

First Bits and Bytes - Creating and Coding Circuits with Arduino

The 4th graders at Southern Pines Elementary School are learning about series and parallel circuits.  Have you ever wondered what it would be like if your holiday lights were designed using a series circuit?  Each time a light malfunctioned, your entire strand of lights would go out!  

That would not be very good!

These students enjoyed a lesson with the Arduino Uno mini computer system, circuit building, 

and coding!

They created both series and parallel circuits and then wrote code using the Codebender App to make their LED lights blink in a certain pattern.  

 

Lesson Highlights Video

How to use a breadboard Video

How to install and use the Codebender App Video


Lesson Plan

Lesson Handouts

Journal Tasks

Printable Breadboard for Circuit Creation

Advanced Blink Code for 4 LEDs

Arduino Kit Link




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~