Category: stem
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“Dance Off” Lego Robotics Challenge
My middle school robotics students are having fun and learning a lot, working through the freely available Carnegie Mellon Lego Spike Prime Robotics curriculum unit on “Movement.” I have 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in this class. Since some students always finish faster than others, I’ve created an optional “Lego Robotics Bonus Challenge” for…
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Reflections on Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy (Part 1)
This week I am attending a 4 1/2 day robotics workshop at Carnegie Mellon University, learning how to teach middle school robotics with the “Lego Spike Prime” robot platform. This is based on the Scratch programming language from MIT, which I love and have been using for over 10 years. In this podcast reflection (from…
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1000 Starships to Mars Every 2 Years
Tonight Elon Musk and Chris Anderson have stretched my mind in some unexpected ways. Elon hopes we’ll see (and is working toward) a future within 10-20 years where SpaceX is launching 1000 Starships to Mars every two years, so we can establish a self-sustaining city of a million humans who will be able to carry…
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Sharing My Enthusiasm for Space Exploration
Last week when Shelly and I were attending the NASA Space Exploration Educators Conference at Space Center Houston, our students and colleagues were out of school with 3 snow days in a row! Today we were all back in class, and I took about 10 minutes in each of my classes to share a little…