For our second last class we visited one of the local schools and teamed up with the Design Lab teacher to introduce an Innovation Hour for all grade levels.
What does that mean? Basically, there are varying levels of technology at many stations that were set up in the gym. Every station introduced a different topic, whether it be AI, pin making, computer system, or hands-on making things.
The first station I was placed in had 3 sections to it. The first was to draw an image of a cat, house, or car.
The second station would be given that drawing, and would have to recreate the image using shapes such as triangles, squares, and circles.
The third station would take the shapes and match them with some corresponding letters.
Once all of the car, house, and cat have been drawn and gone through the same process, students will be able to spell out the word “computer”.
We tried explaining it in a way that students could understand the why of what we were doing, but that was the trickiest part. I’m not even sure that I understood the why!
The second station I was at was using microbit ai, which was a wearable watch that tracks your movement and provided a digital image on the watches screen. Students had to match movements with the images given, and try to get all of the possible images.
This was fun because it allowed kids to get silly and move their bodies.
I got to work with grade 1/2s and then kindies. All of the grades seemed to have a good time with the watches once they got the hang of it. But many of them blew through the movements, or some watches were glitchy and didn’t work great and kept giving students the same images no matter what movement they did.
Below is a video of the microbit AI wearable tracker.