There’s a certain chaos that can accompany passion and creativity in learning. For teachers, the energy and excitement students express when fully embracing a new challenge in the classroom is precious to witness – and can serve as a powerful reminder of just why they chose to become educators in the first place. This enthusiasm then, becomes crucial for teachers to catalyze, encourage and contain.
Great teachers are dynamic, cultivating a contained chaos in discovery while quietly navigating obstacles and working creatively within a hefty number of constraints. For the initiated, the limitations of the classroom can seem pretty daunting. Every classroom is a new puzzle; from the size and layout of the room itself, to the amount of materials and technology available. And then, of course, there’s the curriculum.
More pieces are added to the puzzle as teachers gauge the range of student ability, as well as their own comfort and mastery in teaching the curriculum itself. Is it possible then, to create a curriculum that works with educators’ creativity in the face of constraints, acting as an ally in the quest for an exciting and effective learning environment? We think so.
Here’s how a recent journey revealed Robomatter curriculum as a powerful, versatile tool that empowers individual teaching style and honors creativity irrespective of circumstance.
Back to the Classroom
I recently had the opportunity to travel to the Dallas Independent School District and visit middle-school classrooms implementing Robomatter’s TREC Robotics curriculum, and from the very first classroom, I was struck by the students teamwork and pure exhilaration in completing their task; in this case, a section of the “Robot Olympics.” As a former middle-school teacher myself, I was continually reminded how much fun it is to watch students work with such enthusiasm; a fervor supported by talented teachers encouraging a healthy dose of competitiveness, teamwork and innovative problem-solving. During their robotics course, students learned how to follow best building practices, build and utilize simple machines, and to consider basic physics concepts like friction, center of gravity and gear ratio calculation, as illustrated within the designs as part of the Robot Olympics Capstone Challenge.
Frenetic best described the students while participating in the process of testing and iterating with their robot builds, rendering a seating chart, in this classroom, of little use. Yet, amidst the frenzy of this learner-centered exploration, a focus and productivity emerged. Students were up and about excitedly, but the teacher appeared quite comfortable and aware. While moving among them, the teacher served as an expert guide as students tested their design, changed their robot, searched for different parts and talked out their ideas. Highly effective collaboration like this begins the moment the class does, and is made possible by the vision and immediate actions of the teacher. The moment students arrive, they are made aware of the day’s lesson and tasks, very quickly allowed to begin working collaboratively, all while the teacher walked around the room giving the students feedback and encouragement. It was this teacher’s focus and leadership that allowed for a transcendence of the traditional seating chart and the creation of a more exciting and collaborative building environment.
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Cultivating Confidence
Long rows of computers in the second classroom I visited created a natural impediment to that inspiring type of collaboration witnessed during the Robot Olympics challenge, but it didn’t hinder teaching effectiveness or a similar sense of wonder in the students. Seated individually at their computer work stations, these middle-schoolers saw another side of the Robomatter curriculum as they learned how to program VEX IQ Clawbots with the Gyro sensor. They learned the necessary programming commands through a video and guidance from their teacher, then directly applied that knowledge to solve a mini-challenge that required the use of their newfound programming skills. Through this process, students felt the confidence born of knowing how to apply group-learned skills to tackle difficult challenges on their own.
Since the students had access to all of the resources at their computers (the curriculum videos, ROBOTC Graphical programming language, and Robot Virtual Worlds), this gave the students even more ownership of their new skills and freed the teacher to check in with individual students as they learned. Moving about the room, the teacher communicated with each one of them to make sure the goals of the challenge were well understood. This curriculum choice of having the lesson resources in the hands of the students, allowed a freedom of movement for the teacher, and the individualized checking-in it facilitated gave the teacher special insight into patterns of mistakes. If many students made the same error, he would ask for the attention of the entire class to clear up any misunderstandings – in real time. Much like the first example, however different in appearance, this classroom shared the qualities of an innovative and exciting learning environment promoting high quality teaching.
Individualized instruction, high levels of student engagement, and students working at their own pace were observed in both cases, illustrating not only the creativity and skill of the teachers, but also the versatility of the curriculum itself, a curriculum never limited to one way, or the way, towards successful implementation, but rather, focused on adapting to unique student needs.
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No Computers? No problem.
While embracing the creativity born of constraints is an encouraging idea, some impediments can be perceived as too difficult to overcome. One could argue that Monrovia Football Academy, in Liberia, would fit this categorization. Established in 2015, the Academy’s mission is to “provide Liberia’s talented youth with academic classes, football training, and life skills lessons to improve academic performance, break down gender barriers, and prepare our students to lead positive change in Liberia.”
STEM education can be a wonderful way to help foster positive change in Liberia, but these students aren’t facing immovable desks or a break with the tradition of seating charts. Monrovia’s challenge? A lack of consistent electricity, no computers, and little internet connectivity. Robomatter’s TREC curriculum was able to overcome this impediment by allowing the students to focus on building with the hardware of the VEX IQ Super Kit, through being able to access the curriculum through printed PDF’s. The flexibility afforded by multiple avenues of curriculum accessibility (medium variety, hard copies, online access) has always been considered a valuable asset to teachers as they attempt to solve puzzles like students not having enough room to test their robots at their computer stations. With Monrovia, having the ability to deploy the curriculum in multiple outputs becomes even more valuable. Through consulting well-developed printed PDFs, now resources like building instructions, student guides, teacher notes and assessment questions can all be accessed and used by the school with no internet and no computers, proving that responding creatively to a desire to learn can produce results far beyond expectation.