Imagine studying the first American colony of Jamestown and then watching it come to life in MinecraftEdu – the colonists, the natives, the supplies, the weather, etc. Imagine building and printing a 3D model of your favorite ship, or learning programming and storytelling at the same time? Those are just a few of the exciting things Episcopal Collegiate Lower School students are exploring in the Lower School Design Lab. Although technology is part of everyday life for Episcopal Collegiate students, the design lab is a unique space where students have the freedom to create and explore using all kinds of brain-boosting technology.
Sparking an early interest in technology is becoming more and more important, says Christian Rogers, Lower School Technology Curriculum Specialist. According to the U.S. Department of Education, by 2022, the U.S. will need to add about 1 million professionals in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to meet the workforce demands of the future.
Much of the work in the design lab reinforces what students are learning in core classes. Back to the early colonies studied by our 5th graders. Using MinecraftEdu, students were immersed in a virtual version of the famous colony that they built using online research materials. Each class was broken into three groups of builders, crafters, and farmers who decided what needed to be done to survive and build a successful colony. From time to time, students send out virtual scouts to trade with Native Americans for hard-to-find supplies. There is also the occasional attack on the compound to make things interesting. Students log their progress on Google Forms.
In another design lab project, students in grades K-5 used a team approach and classic Legos to develop important soft skills like communication, collaboration, and sharing. Working in small groups, students began by sharing building and support responsibilities to design an instruction-based model of a house and a scooter. After practicing role sharing with instructions, groups were asked to collaborate on developing a unique model. Following their build, student gave a brief presentation on their construction process. (video)
Storytelling is an incredibly creative skill that involves choosing a setting, characters, a plot, and a resolution. Scratch Jr. is a tool that offers our kindergarten and first graders an easy-to-use platform that does all of this while learning how to program. This free app developed by MIT provides children with a block code language to write animation scripts for characters (sprites) in a story or game. Our students wrote many interesting programs for each sprite that involved motion, text bubbles, loops, scene changes, and special effects.
Number sentences and stacks are a lot of fun to build in MinecraftEdu. Third grade students extended their classwork in a private virtual room where they used any type of Minecraft block (glass, grass, stone, metal, etc.) to build a structure of their choice. For each type of material they used, students kept count and wrote mathematic expressions to represent their creations. For example, the sponge and red wool wall in the image to the left used 15 blocks, so the student could write this as 3 x 5 = 15 using number blocks.
Using a 3D program called TinkerCad, Episcopal's John Mark Sullivan designed and 3D printed a three-deck steamboat with portholes, lifeboats, and smokestacks. His process involved parametrically deforming three cylinders, intersecting rectangles with the top two decks, and subtracting one shape from the other to create portholes. Finally, he replicated and mirrored about 30 lifeboats for the top deck. This is a very detailed piece that John Mark can now paint and see if it floats.
Finally, the Cotton Ball Drop had fourth graders resisting Newton's Law of Gravity using up-cycled resources. Each group had five minutes to plan how they would reduce the fall with innovative design ideas like; cutting tubes in half, adjusting tube length, and a variety of placement patterns. Working in small groups, they went to work with tape and determination to earn the highest score. A straight drop reaches the floor in about one second. The winning team earned a score of 5.75 seconds. Following each run, a student representative was chosen to provide the class with a report of their team's process. (video 1) (video 2) (video 3)