A New Frontier

For the past few years, I have been designing curriculum for the Tustin Public Schools Foundation Summer STEAM program with a team of incredibly talented educators. Usually, we design a four-week course, four hours a day, four days a week for five classes of 3rd through 5th graders and five classes of 6th through 8th graders. All the time and effort put into this program begins in January and takes up most of my summer. The program attracts some of the best teachers in our district and they do a remarkable job of making STEAM curriculum fun and relevant. However, this summer, we added an advanced robotics course and it was a huge success!

All of our middle schools in TUSD have Project Lead the Way trained teachers and robotics will be offered at all six middle schools this school year. Several of us teachers have talked about competing in the VEX robotics competitions and one school even tried it out last year. So, our STEAM team decided that this summer was a great opportunity to build student capacity in robotics and leadership. We invited four students from each school to begin the process of starting  a robotics league in our district. I was lucky enough to teach this program with a friend and collaborator, Jacque Magner. I learned many things this summer, but here are my top three:

Lesson 1: Do not be afraid of the struggle!

The students that struggled the most, learned the most. We had five of six teams copy a six bar lift that one of our teacher aides brought as an example on the first day of class. Although they all had different versions of his robot, they built their robots much more quickly than anticipated and focused more on programming and practicing driving in the final fourth week. With my encouragement, one team went in a different direction and failed time and time again. I was discouraged with them until we all realized that this team had actually learned the most from the design process. They changed their competition strategy at the last minute to compensate for the design flaws and did surprisingly well!

Lesson 2: Bring in the Experts
Although I have experience teaching robotics, I am far from an expert and can only offer ideas from my own experiences. We had three high school students and one college student with us the entire four weeks and they were invaluable. I will continue to bring them in as I visit each team next year at their home schools. We also had the privilege of meeting Chip Foose from the show Overhaulin and Kenny Pfitzer from the show West Coast Customs who is now working with Foose Designs. Foose showed students how to think out of the box as he sketched an original design after hearing about the robots' criteria and constraints. Pfitzer jumped right in and began giving mechanical and structural ideas that helped the performance of each robot. Pfitzer was so impressed with the program, he said that he will be coming back to help our teams again in the future. My advice is to bring in as many parents, students, and community members that are willing to offer ideas and support to your program.

Lesson 3: Keep People in the Loop
Each week of the program we sent home a newsletter to help keep parents informed. We also sent this newsletter to the teachers and future coaches at each school site to make sure they felt informed and connected to the program.. It is also important that we bridge the communication between the teachers, the Tustin Public Schools Foundation, and the people in charge at the district office. This program is a bit grass roots in the sense that it began with teacher leaders and is now gaining support and momentum from those at the top. We need everyone on board to make this happen, so the more we communicate, the better.

Pictured to the left, a team explains their design to our Superintendent, Dr. Gregory Franklin, and our Assistant Superintendent, Dr. Crystal Turner. They have shown interest and support since hearing about this idea back in January. We are very thankful for all who have helped make this happen and we are looking forward to the year ahead.

Making Time for Social Media

As teachers wind down for summer, my job begins to get busier. As a curriculum writer and teacher of the Tustin Public Schools Foundation Summer STEAM program, I work many hours preparing for the summer courses. Although it becomes tough to find time for social media, I try my hardest to at least check in once a day to keep in touch with the fast pace of the ed tech world.

Lesson Learned: Keeping connected with other educators and the latest news in the ed tech world is as important as any other type of professional development.