Collaboration

We had our first funded planning day and our goal was to create curriculum links and activities to go with our robots. It was a little overwhelming to play with all our robots all at once so we decided to begin by focusing our attention on one robot -DASH it was!

Through pins, tweets and blogs we began to explore different tasks and ideas that would connect Dash to our curriculum. We quickly found ourselves
excited about how much was already out there. From fashionista to snow plows- DASH can become anything!

We worked through the ideas and re-created task cards with open ended challenges that would engage and allow students to meet the challenge in a variety of ways. Our morning quickly flew by as we created our bank of rich tasks.

We switched gears in the afternoon and collaborated and consulted with Dr. Jennifer Flynn (Board Consultant-Student Success). Jennifer had already been developing curriculum links in math, science and language for makerspaces. We discussed some of the global competencies that students would naturally develop through the makerspace movement- collaboration, creativity and innovation, communication, and critical thinking,  Our enthusiasm and excitement grew now that we were able to generate ideas as collaborative partners. Together we shared the resources we have developed so far and discussed next steps.  Once we have finished refining these tools, we will happily share these here.

We also outlined our plan to begin creating a shared mindset around deep learning and the makerspace movement. Our next step is to have release days for our french partners to come into our classroom, with our students, and experience how the robots work. As a follow up, our partners would create french task cards related to french and social studies.

A. Eaton, P. Roche, A. Porcari