The Gentlemen Geniuses: Middle School Boys Advisory
My students need a littleBits Electronics kit, three Arduino starter kits, one BrickPi robotics kit, three MaKey MaKey Invention Kits, and two Raspberry Pi starter kits.
$987 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
The gentlemen in my boys advisory are great at filling out worksheets, but are missing out on opportunities to engage in dynamic, cooperative, and inventive play with technology in school.
This is an opportunity to give often overlooked boys a chance to fully engage in real, authentic learning.
The gentlemen are nearly all children of immigrants from countries as wide ranging as Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico, Columbia, Romania, and Nepal, to name just a few.
As urban students, they've been lucky to be in safe and calm classrooms for their elementary schools but have often missed out on the chance to learn the kinds of invention, innovation, experimentation, and critical play that is so important to 21st Century citizens.
The gentlemen are, like many and most 13 year old boys, curious, collaborative, and, as it happens, rowdy and playful. Most of them have enormously inquisitive sides that they engage with at home in sandbox video games like Minecraft, but have yet to fire those skills in creative ways at school.
The students in our school are more than 80% Title I, meaning they receive free meals during the day for living below the poverty line.
My Project
The supplies and materials I'm requesting are the kinds of modern technology and tools that many entrepreneurs and thinkers believe get students in the immediate work of computer programming, coding, electronic circuitry, and robotics--all STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) that are hugely important for all citizens, especially young ones like my gentlemen, to engage with.
These tools, like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and MaKey MaKey, ask people to think creatively and technically about solving problems. It is these kinds of problems--open-ended, non-obvious, student-created--that are key to successful, life-long, and authentic learning.
I want the boys in my advisory to work together in building things, figuring out how technologies interact, solving problems, and creating more tangible and useful gadgets than they thought possible in 20 minutes.
My students have already shown the desire to learn more complex technical skills and to engage with technology in more authentic, student-driven ways.
They have worked successfully on small electronics projects already and these materials will help them do more ambitious, more engaging, and more impressive work and play together.
My boys need to engage together in these ways and show the potential of boys in school to do powerful, intelligent, and creative work.
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