The weeks leading up to winter break were always a bit of a juggling act for me in the classroom - balancing end of year learning goals with ever-growing excitement from the kids, school celebrations and festivities, and my own personal holiday hoopla. It could get exhausting when I didn’t have a good handle on some fun, engaging lessons to fall back on. Over the years I amassed a pretty solid repertoire in my pre-winter break bag of tricks, and I’m sure everyone here has some of those too!
So my question is really two-fold:
1. What is your ‘go to’ lesson/project/learning center activity for this time of year? Do you have a favorite holiday-related robotics or CS activity that you’ve done with your students?
2. What is your fondest teacher memory of a lesson or project that you and your students did to capitalize on their pre-winter break energy?
I’m sure @Omar_Cortez, @Daniel_Faddis, @Bonnie_Sikorski, @Aimee_DeFoe, @Anna_Blake, @Chris_Mause and @David_Kelly have oodles of great ideas and memories to share! My hope is that this conversation can give us all some new ideas to add to our own bags of tricks in the coming weeks!
We done a robotic float in the Christmas Parade. It is a great way for the kids to show of their skills to the public, by using robotic to animate their float. This is also a good time to look for donations after doing a public event.
2 Likes
This is the time of year when I teach the lesson titled: Oh-My-Gosh-You-Guys-We-Only-Have-Two-Saturdays-Left-Until-Our-First-Competition-Mikey-Stop-Wearing-The-Tank-Tread-Like-A-Bandolier-We-Need-To-Focus-On-Getting-The-Claw-Working
The kids love it.
4 Likes
That’s awesome! It reminds me of the VEX GO Parade Float STEM Lab - in case your area doesn’t have a Christmas Parade, you can do a school-wide one! And while this is written for VEX GO, it can easily be adapted to any platform.
One of my favorite-ever holiday related projects was my second graders’ holiday store project, in which the kids made and sold lip balm and LED light up cards and gave the money to a non-profit that supported homeless children. I wrote about that project in this VEX Insights post.
But, I think it would be super fun to build some VEX IQ treat delivery robots and drive them into classrooms around a school to drop off candy!
1 Like
