Category: stem
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Initial Minecraft Competition World Created with MCEdit
Today was the second week and second meeting of our “Maker’s Club” for 4th and 5th graders at my elementary school. The post, “Project 1845 and the Forbidden City of China” describes some of the things students in our club did on our two MinecraftEDU servers this afternoon. I’m starting a 3 day series of…
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Lessons Learned With Elementary STEM Centers
The past two weeks I’ve facilitated a series of center-based lessons for my 4th and 5th grade STEM students (@iesSTEM) in a unit I titled, “The Science & Technology of Sound & Music.” In addition to learning about sound and music, my students have been practicing ways to “document their learning” using text, images, and…
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Introduce Students to Coding with Hopscotch for iPad
Update Dec 13th: The archived recording of this webinar in Adobe Connect is available. These are my presentation slides for today’s free ISTE SIGML webinar, “Introduce Students to Coding with Hopscotch for iPad.” The webinar starts at 7 pm EST. Introduce Students to Coding with Hopscotch for iPad from Wesley Fryer The session description is:…
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Basic, Intermediate and Advanced MinecraftEDU Challenges
After three consecutive snow days starting last Friday, we’re finally back to school this week on Wednesday and my STEM class will be exploring MinecraftEDU a second week. With the help of my 16 year old son, who is a Minecraft expert, I created three different challenges for students to try based on their past…
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MinecraftEDU Beginner Challenge: Craft 10 Basic Tools with Wood and Stone
My 16 year old son, who is a Minecraft expert, is helping me develop several short, simple MinecraftEDU challenges to use with my 4th and 5th grade students as we continue exploring and learning with Minecraft in our STEM class. Last week I had students explore the “Tutorial World” which comes with MinecraftEDU software, running…
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The Hour of Code
This is a short paragraph I submitted for our school’s December newsletter for parents, discussing what we’ve been doing in STEM class in November and are doing this month supporting “The Hour of Code.” IES Students in STEM in November learned to “code” on our class iPads using the free app, Hopscotch (www.gethopscotch.com). A free…
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Great STEM Rube Goldberg Video – Girls Love Making Stuff!
Take a couple minutes and watch the now-viral video, “GoldieBlox, Rube Goldberg, & Beastie Boys “Princess Machine” (a concert for little girls).” It’s a delightful Rube Goldberg project, but it makes a larger point about how engineering and MAKING isn’t just for boys! Girls love making engineering projects too! Thanks to Chris Simon, STEM Coordinator…
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Hopscotch Challenges: A Free Curriculum eBook for iPad Coders
Update Nov 16, 2013: I’ve revised the eBook twice since publishing it last week, it’s now in version 1.2, with several new chapters and a student video demo about using Emoji keyboard icons as Hopscotch characters! This week I started introducing my 4th and 5th grade STEM students to coding with the free iPad app,…