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Mr. McDonald's Classroom Edit display name

  • Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School
  • Santa Ana, CA
  • Nearly all students from low‑income households Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more

Your custom url is https://www.donorschoose.org/robot-mcdonald

The LEGO Mindstorms Education Ev3 Core Set is the back bone of our Mendez Inspired by Technology (MIT) program. These sets teach the learning and innovations skills that separate students who are prepared for increasingly complex life and work environments in today’s world and those who are not. Our MIT Enrichment Program will capture student imagination and support their aspirations and interest. Due to the fact that our students live in a technology and media-driven environment, marked by access to an abundance of information, rapid changes in technology tools and the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions on an unprecedented scale, our students must learn to become effective citizens and workers. Our MIT course will provide our students with life-long functional and critical thinking skills such as information literacy, media literacy, and ICT (Information, Communications and Technology) literacy, which are essential to student success. The MIT Enrichment program allows us as teachers to encourage our students to become critical thinkers while using the skills they need for a digital future. Our course is built on a hands-on approach to learning with a heavy emphasis on personalized/self-paced learning. At first students will program a robot to drive fixed distances in set patterns. Then students will begin programming groups that move at their own learning pace. As the challenges with robotics and programming become more complex, students will learn to break the large problems down into simpler ones, and construct solutions with care. Robotics activities are concrete, contextualized, and provide immediate feedback; important factors in satisfying a student’s desire for success and creating the motivation to continue learning. The pervasiveness of robotics technologies, from airplane autopilots, to bank machines, to smartphones, to self-driving cars helps students to be “engaged learners” as they believe that the content they are studying is valuable.

About my class

The LEGO Mindstorms Education Ev3 Core Set is the back bone of our Mendez Inspired by Technology (MIT) program. These sets teach the learning and innovations skills that separate students who are prepared for increasingly complex life and work environments in today’s world and those who are not. Our MIT Enrichment Program will capture student imagination and support their aspirations and interest. Due to the fact that our students live in a technology and media-driven environment, marked by access to an abundance of information, rapid changes in technology tools and the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions on an unprecedented scale, our students must learn to become effective citizens and workers. Our MIT course will provide our students with life-long functional and critical thinking skills such as information literacy, media literacy, and ICT (Information, Communications and Technology) literacy, which are essential to student success. The MIT Enrichment program allows us as teachers to encourage our students to become critical thinkers while using the skills they need for a digital future. Our course is built on a hands-on approach to learning with a heavy emphasis on personalized/self-paced learning. At first students will program a robot to drive fixed distances in set patterns. Then students will begin programming groups that move at their own learning pace. As the challenges with robotics and programming become more complex, students will learn to break the large problems down into simpler ones, and construct solutions with care. Robotics activities are concrete, contextualized, and provide immediate feedback; important factors in satisfying a student’s desire for success and creating the motivation to continue learning. The pervasiveness of robotics technologies, from airplane autopilots, to bank machines, to smartphones, to self-driving cars helps students to be “engaged learners” as they believe that the content they are studying is valuable.

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About my class

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