This week, kindergarten classes learned about skyscrapers and the two major challenges architects and engineers face when designing and building these tall structures -- creating a sturdy foundation that can support the weight of the structure and developing a design that takes into account strong wind. In the lab, students built their own skyscrapers and then tested their resilience against a stream of "wind" from a hair dryer. In the process, students also practiced our STEM mindset of digging into mistakes and using information from a failed attempt to improve their designs.
In their first computer science project of the year, our 7th and 8th graders took a big step in their journeys as programmers -- moving from block-based to text-based coding. In previous STEM projects, students have used tools that allow them to snap together code "blocks" to make things happen. In this unit, they were responsible for typing commands to tell the computer how to execute actions. The image below shows the difference between text-based coding and block-based coding. While there are many different text-based coding languages, our 7th & 8th graders learned skills in Python, due to its beginner-friendly nature. Still, making this transition is not easy, so students were provided with resources and modules to work through that allowed them to have some starting directions and then challenged them to stretch their thinking by generating their own additions and modifications. Here's a look at a project, called "Turtle Race," in action: https:
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