My students attend a public middle school nestled in a small historic town located along the coast of North Carolina. Our school serves a diverse population coming from many parts of the world and all walks of life. We have recently adopted a program to assist our students with building the skills and strategies needed to overcome obstacles and achieve success in their futures. With this program we are building collaborative strategies and increasing exposure to potential college and career options for our students.
My students have recently suffered a huge tragedy as we were caught in the direct path of hurricane Florence - and they are the true definition of resilience.
Our community as a whole has suffered tremendous loss with many of our students being displaced from their homes and losing most of their possessions. While we work to rebuild and find a sense of normalcy, students are eager to return to classes and have shown a huge amount of compassion for their fellow classmates. Many of our school, staff and student resources have been lost, but it has not slowed down our drive for success or desire to accomplish our goals.
My Project
I would like to add a class set of Sphero SPRKs to our classroom resources to give students the opportunity to work with robots and programming in our eighth grade science class. I like to incorporate STEM challenges into my curriculum units to help expose my students to interests and career opportunities they may not have available to them otherwise. Many of today's careers involve machinery and programming, and I would like to provide my students learning experiences in the classroom that help build a foundation for those skill sets.
With the addition of Sphero SPRKs to my Hydrology and Environmental Science unit, students will design a device that can venture into our local water supply to collect real time water quality data for them to analyze.
Students will then create a public service announcement that will be displayed or distributed out in our local community allowing them to share their findings and encourage others to help in protecting our waters. With this project I will be reinforcing key STEM skills with the engineering of their devices that they will attach to the Spheros as well as teaching students how to be good stewards of the Earth and Environment.
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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. Walmsley and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
