During their first STEM lessons, PreK students met our STEM class mascot -- Q -- and learned about what it means to be a "Curious Creator." After spending time designing their own Q in their first class, PreK engineers spent their second class building towers that could support Q. With their bags containing an assortment of building materials, students explored the different ways the items could be combined to yield a stable and tall tower. Check out some of their inventive towers below!
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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