Guest Blog Post by Megan Hamilton
Our
Utah County 4-H Wonder League Robotics Clubs started meeting one night a week
at our community training field in October.
Each team consisted of up to five youth (ages 6 to 12 years) with a
designated adult club leader. Each team
agreed to meet approximately 2 hours a week.
They were encouraged to complete at least one mission per week.
Similar
robotics programs and interventions utilizing Lego Mindstorms have been
successfully implemented in informal educational settings. Many of the age ranges for Lego Robotics kits
vary, but in general they target children 10 years or older. One of the goals for our program is to
implement a robotics intervention geared toward a younger elementary
audience. We hope to increase the
likelihood of youth participation in our 4-H STEM programs for older elementary
and middle school students.
As
an educator, you can choose to use these robots during class time or you can
utilize them in after-school programs.
You do not need to run a club (even though it is fun for students to
compete in the national challenge). You
will need a tablet or smart phone that is compatible with the Wonder App as
well as Dash & Dot robots. Wonder
Workshop also has curricula developed by teachers that is aligned to the Common
Core & NGSS standards.
There
are grant programs that you can apply to if your school does not have adequate
funding for the purchase of your robots.
For example, the Utah STEM Action Center offers a STEM Classroom grant
for K-12 educators.
Advantages of
Dash & Dot robots
·
Dash & Dot robots are very durable! Our club
participants dropped them many times and we have not needed to repair a single
one throughout the entire competition
·
There are not very many pieces to keep track of
and clean-up is easy! We only lost one ball during the two months of our
competition.
·
Dash & Dot are affordable and can be
utilized in multiple ways. We used the robots to sponsor an “Hour of Code”
event in addition to the Wonder League Competition.
·
Students can easily learn the coding language
while playing Scroll Quest. This may not
sound impressive, but there is less responsibility on the adult organizer or
teacher to teach the coding language. Wonder
Workshop teaches kids STEM principles like conditionals, variables, and
sequences within the program itself.
·
Students are working together to solve the
challenges so it helps develop additional 21st century skills such
as collaboration and communication
Megan Hamilton is
currently a STEM Professional Practice Assistant Professor for Utah State
University Extension. She works as a STEM specialist in Utah County to
provide coherent, focused, and sustainable program(s) in STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics) with a strong youth emphasis. She can be contacted at
megan.hamilton@usu.edu
Thank you for reading this blog post! Special thanks to my guest blogger Megan Hamilton! Thank you also to my fabulous future teachers who had a great time learning with Dash and Dot!
Please follow this blog for more teaching ideas!
If you like this, you might also be interested in one of my science units. STEM Engineering Activities for Elementary
Force and Motion Unit
