My amazing middle school students form a diverse community of Caucasian, Hispanic, Native American, African-American, and Asian students who are determined to "beat the odds" to reach their educational goals and prepare for their future. Our community is not very affluent and many students have little access to technology at home. Regardless, we strive to instill in each student, especially those in our at risk population, a joy of life-long learning, technological literacy, and life and leadership skills to prepare them for college and career.
Our seventh and eighth grade classes are made up of 40 hard-working students, many of whom come from bilingual households and receive free or reduced price lunch.
We have a fantastic group of learners who need your help to take their learning to the next level. We want to learn and apply coding skills to Lego Mindstorm robots we are building.
My Project
We need a new laptop for our robotics programming. My students need your help getting a shared laptop so they can practice computer programming skills by writing and uploading software for robots . "Wow, that's cool. What does it do?" is the first thing students say as they choose a robot to build. We are lucky to have 2 new Mindstorms kits through DonorsChoose as well as 4 older kits on loan from another school. But we do not have the capability to write and upload programs to control our robots. Last year, students used my ancient personal laptop with limited success, lots of frustration and wasted time.
Your generous donation to our project will improve our middle school classroom by helping students literally bring their robots to life with coding skills using a new Window-based laptop.
With your help, our budding engineers will be able to take their robots to the next step, successfully writing programs to control the sensors and motors that enable the robots to perform required tasks. Advanced students can then go further by modifying the hardware ("bones) of their robot, as well as the programs ("mind").
The result? Hands-on learning, with lots of room for experimentation where mistakes are integral to the learning process and persistence flourishes, as students are very motivated to succeed. Adding programming this year is an awesome way to make math and physics relevant for students at all levels as they discover together what works and what doesn't.
In this technology literate world, access to one new Windows-based laptop will help our students learn how to write code!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Consterdine and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.