littleBits
Ms. Matias Awarded STEAM Grant for Students
MacKinnon Middle School students received two Littlebits Droids with over 16+ STEAM lessons to understand engineering as an iterative process through DonorsChoose.org. 7th grade students in marking period 1 completed a career roadmap project through Next Gen Personal Finance. I used the free financial literacy resources (including projects, activities, case studies, interactives, data crunches and fine prints) from NGPF. NGPF is offered a $200 DonorsChoose.org gift code that I applied to our classroom littleBits project. The remaining $74 was donated by Macy’s department store.
When writing this grant I was focusing on coding and programing, creativity and design, and robotics. Our students now have the opportunity to take coding off the screen and show their coding skills in real life. We have given them the freedom to be creative through the use of littleBits Kits; which are extremely versatile.
The jobs of tomorrow are going to require creativity and innovation. Our first task was to assemble the robots. The assembly took two tech classes of 7th and 8th grade, plus our Tech club students. Real world problem after assembly - we noticed that the R2D2 heads did not spin. Using our littleBits classroom kits students took on this real world task of making the robot drive and head spin simultaneously. They were successful!