As you walk down the hall toward our Lego Robotics lab, you hear and feel the energy of our students before you see them. Their energy and excitement spills out of the room and is contagious.
Walk into our robotics lab and you will see a diverse group of 40 students eagerly and excitedly engaged in the process of designing, building, and programming Lego Mindstorms robots that will perform a variety of complex tasks to meet a challenge.
The students in our robotics club are very diverse. We have students who are Talented and Gifted, English Language Learners, have special needs, and regular education students. We have students from many different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Our school has been designated as a STEM school (or STEAM), which means we have a focus on science, technology, engineering and math.
My Project
Our robotics club teaches programming and engineering design skills to our students who are actively engaged in this process. The laptops will enable our students to program more effectively and to be able to modify the program while at competitions and other locations. The desk top computers we currently use are out of date and do not function well with the program. In addition, we hope expand this program into science classrooms so all of our 812 students will have an opportunity to learn these skills. These laptops are a crucial aspect of making this possible.
By funding these laptops, you make it possible to enhance our robotic club so that they can program their robots more effectively. You also make it possible to expand our robotics program so that more of our students will be able to participate in classroom experiences that involve computer programming and engineering and design, which aligns with the new national science standards and our state curriculum standards.
Computer programming is a vital part of our every day lives.
We all need to understand how computers work in order to utilize them more effectively. However, we need to develop new computer programmers because it is one of the highest paid careers and is increasing at a rate of 12% by 2020, according to US News. CNN reports that there are so few programmers in the US that companies are importing them from overseas. We need to train our own citizens at an early age to compete for these jobs.
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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 Ms. Nelson and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.