Kullerstrand Robotics & Coding Club- Bringing STEM to Life

Teaching with Passion

Kyle Walker, the Digital Teacher Librarian at Kullerstrand Elementary, shares the passion of robotics and coding with his students. This year, with the help of a generous donor, Kyle started the Robotics and Coding club at his school. Every Monday afternoon, students collaborate and work together to engineer a robot that can be coded to perform unique tasks.

Community Connection

Kyle has reached out to various community members to help build career connections between computer science and robotics. The School of Mines Robotics Club made a visit earlier this year and shared their own robotics project and mentored the students. Jason Roadman, an engineer at NREL visited the club and shared some of his own engineering expertise with wind turbines, allowing students to build real world connections.

Competitions

Want to see the Robotic club in action? The club will be competing in a VEX Robotics tournament at Red Hawk Elementary School in Erie on February 11th. For this competition, student groups will design, build, and control a robot for the playing field. The robot will complete various challenges like moving objects over a fence, placing objects in containers, and balancing the robot on a seesaw-like bridge. Students will learn to use professional job skills completing these tasks such as teamwork, communication, and time management.

Interview with Kyle Walker

How did you decide which platform to use?

“I knew the two main platforms were VEX and LEGO Mindstorms, so when I attended ISTE last summer, I spent some time observing both exhibition booths. I also researched online.  The other big factor for me was how convenient it would be for my students to attend local competitions. I found out that there is a strong VEX presence up in the St. Vrain Schools system, and they host competitions within easy driving distance. I contacted them and spent an afternoon with one of their robotics clubs to get ideas on how to start my own. The VEX platform for elementary is called VEX IQ. These are primarily plastic parts and are simpler and less expensive. Once you get into middle school, you move up to the option of using VEX EDR. These are primarily metal robots, which are more elaborate and more expensive”.

How are coding skills used in the design of the robots?

“It’s possible to do entry-level robotics, and even participate in competitions without doing any coding at all. There are three ways to compete, and only one of them requires the programming of an autonomous robot. VEX robots can be programmed using any of the four different software/languages. I went with RobotC because it’s an industry standard, and it’s an excellent transition between graphical coding and text-based coding. In other words, if your kids are already familiar with graphical coding (i.e. Code.org, Scratch, Hopscotch, etc.), RobotC’s graphical version moves just a little bit further toward text-based coding without the students having to actually type anything other than the occasional value. In fact, the text of the code is fully visible right there on the graphical components that they connect together to write their programs. Where does coding come into play with robotics? When you want to make your robot do anything other than the standard drive-it-around-and-move-the-arm business, you’re going to have to program it to do so. If you want it to go faster or slower than the default, you’ll have to program it. If you want it to do anything based on the input of its sensors (light sensors, distance sensors, color sensors, bumper sensors, touch sensors, gyroscope), you’ll have to use code to program it with what the values of those sensors should be and what you want the robot to do in response. For example, you could write code that tells the robot to turn 180 degrees and go in the other direction if it comes within 100 millimeters of an obstacle. I had some girls whose robot arm wasn’t moving fast enough to push down a lever, so they had to learn the code to make the motor that turns that arm faster, in order to give it sufficient velocity. With the coding aspect of robotics, you can go as deep as you are willing to go, but it’s always connected to your design. It’s always fulfilling some aspect of what you need the robot to do”.

What advice would you give to someone starting a club?

“Advice for starting a club: Reach out and find others who are doing so! It’s not necessary to go in completely blind. And look ahead and determine what your long-range goals are. Because you are going to be investing a lot of money in the materials, you don’t want to find yourself down the road with an excited group of students who can’t go to any competitions because the competitions for your chosen platform are all in another state. It would be better for Jeffco to decide on its platform together (VEX! VEX! VEX!) so we can begin to host our own competitions and not have to worry about travel much at all. As far as money is concerned, this will depend a lot on your population. Many parents would be excited about this and your PTA might be a great source. But local tech businesses might be willing to sponsor a school team too, so look outside your building. Put some of the responsibility on the students and have them put together a business plan and do their own fundraiser. Space and organization: My library is a wreck right now. Robotics activities need a work space, and you need a place to store the parts. I bought little plastic bins and organized them that way, but now I need a better place to put all these bins. Teach responsibility and organization: The kids need to take responsibility for a lot of things in a robotics club, so make this one of your main themes. We have adopted “professionalism” as our theme, and I make the kids accountable to being professional in the club and in the classroom. We operate on a “3 strikes you’re out” policy – they have to turn in all their classwork and behave for their teachers. I remind the teachers to use this as leverage in the classroom. So far, it’s paid off”.

Want to start your own Robotics Club and help prepare your students for future careers? Check out Kyle’s website and these additional resources to get started.

Vex Robotics
Vex Crossover Competition

5 Strategies for Tech Integration

Jeffco's Educational Technology Team visited 3 Apple Distinguished Schools in St. Vrain Valley Schools, as part of Apple's school visit program. Although these schools were 1:1 iPad schools, the following 5 strategies can be implemented at any school site to aid in integrating technology.

Flip through our presentation to view the strategies and see some examples from real school settings.

If your school is implementing any of these these strategies, please share your success with our team! We'd love to see your photos and hear your ideas!

Collaboration with JCPL is the Name of the Game...

As Digital Teacher Librarians (DTLs) it comes as second nature to find the collaboration opportunities in all that we do. Multiply that times two and the energy becomes an unstoppable force, something akin to the thing superheroes are made of (Did you know Batgirl was a Librarian during her “off” hours?).

When we combine the energies of our Jeffco DTLs and the Jefferson County Public Library (JCPL) resources amazing things happen for our staff and students. Just as Gru’s Minions each have unique talents, when they work together they are able to accomplish extraordinary tasks.

At this point, you might be asking, how does the work of JCPL combine with our Jeffco DTLs to create this superpower for our students and staff? To begin, each a month JCPL representatives including Arra Katona, Cindy Mathews, Kim Barnes and Ian Livingston meet with Jeffco’s DTL Coordinators (Tara McJunkin & Heidi Floyd) to collaborate and align the work of both groups. As a result of these meetings we have developed a variety of resources that directly align and connect the work of both organizations. One of the newest and most beneficial resources for Jeffco DTLs, staff and students is the JCPL DTL News. This resource has been built specifically to align to Jeffco’s curriculum with JCPL’s resources. It is a collection of differentiated publications - one each for Elementary, Middle School, & High School DTLs. This timely newsletter links Jeffco schools with JCPL resources that teachers and students can be accessing at that time or in the near future to support their learning.

Likely the strongest collaboration between JCPL and Jeffco DTLs is JCPL’s summer reading program. The summer program engages Jeffco students with reading over summer in a variety of ways – the annual reading challenge (tracking minutes read & awarding prizes), offering literacy related programs to students and their families from preschool all the way through high school (and beyond). JCPL has worked with school liaisons to connect with families and community, offering summer reading programs at schools and outside of 9-5 business hours.

JCPL has also coordinated with Jeffco DTLs to offer in-school support – including visiting schools to teach students about the wide variety of free research databases the library offers. These free databases typically require a JCPL library card, which is another area where the teams work together to help students and families receive their public library cards. Not only do library cards grant students access to millions of books and hundreds of databases, but they also connect families with opportunities to learn technology skills and free access to variety of museums in the metro area through a Culture Pass.

At the start of the 2016 school year, JCPL purchased several collections of ebooks that aligned directly with the Jeffco curriculum. In fact, 24 ebooks on Native Americans and 14 ebooks on Colorado were purchased that allowed for unlimited users at once. These texts supported a variety of learning styles, by each including the ability to read the text to students, an interactive timeline and an interactive map.

Engaging students and community with new technologies is another advantage of this pairing. JCPL recently offered Breakout Edu or Escape Room challenges at their local libraries but then also brought these engaging opportunities to several Jeffco schools. A recent Harry Potter Escape Room was offered at schools in alignment with the release of the Fantastic Beasts movie, based off J.K. Rowling’s book.

So, you might be wondering what is in currently the works for these collaborators.

We can tell you plans are already rolling for the 2017 Summer Reading program, along with several summer coding camps. We continue to discuss resource alignment – matching JCPLs resources and potential resources with Jeffco’s curriculum and the needs of our Jeffco schools. As a partnership, we look forward to our next steps and finding the best ways to collaborate for our students, staff, and community.