Category: K-6 Curriculum

ST Math Blog: Engagement Thrives When Students Own Their Learning

Excerpt: “Creating a Classroom Environment That Fosters Engagement…

As someone who has been designing visual goal setting and feedback systems for years, the  CA Math & Science Challenge! designer thought that “the unifying goal of always working to help JiJi the penguin cross the screen in ST Math, no matter what the math concept, was brilliant,” and that ST Math’s visual feedback system was first rate. “The students always have a sense of progress and momentum. That goes a long way toward explaining why ST Math is so successful across many different schools and districts.”

Although ST Math was a game-changer, he  knew that for the program to truly be effective, there is still a large role for administrators and teachers to play.

“Schools often need help with two areas. The first is figuring out how to embed ST Math into school culture and goal setting systems to increase student engagement in school and at home. The second is discovering how to motivate teachers to play and understand every ST Math topic, and each game’s math learning goals for the grade they teach. This prepares them to integrate ST Math into their math instruction and to apply the concepts that students are mastering to other subjects.”

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Want more diversity in STEM? • A Good Beginning Never Ends! • K-6 STEM Curriculum

CA Math & Science Challenge! • K-6 STEM Sequence
If we want American math & science “athletes” to be stay competitive, we need to get every American child playing the game at a young age —giving them a lifelong Early Learning Advantage  •  “A good beginning  ever ends… “

A Science and Information Technology Program modeled on the US Olympic Development Program.

Three steps to developing world-class math and science “athletes”:
  • Step 1: Get young children playing the “Game” of Math & Science–at a young age; 
  • Step 2: Identify those with a true love for that game; 
  • Step 3: Get them World-class Coaching in a Special Math & Science Learning Environment, an Active Learning Zone™.

• sTEm =  science Technology Engineering mathematics
• I.T. =  Information Technology

K-2 ROBOTICS • “The Power of Project Trees”

Students-Display-Completed-Projects.jpg

The Power of Project Trees

Early Learning Advantage It is well established that giving children an early introduction to music, mathematics, athletic games, or foreign languages gives them a life-long head start over those who start later in life. Two questions arose when we considered early learning robotics:

  • Can we introduce children in grades K-2 and 3-8 to such complex activities as coding, applied mathematics, and engineering design in a way that ensures they are actually learning?
  • Can we find a way to get children to fall in love with these activities, to choose to work on them, through sheer joy of learning? Becoming so absorbed in coding, troubleshooting, and problem-solving that they lose track of time and have to be reminded to go home?

The “Power of Project Trees”  The thing that allowed us to answer ‘yes’ to both questions, and to start a rigorous robotics-based Coding- Applied Math- Engineering Design curriculum at such a young age, was the  Project Challenge-Tree (a visual goal-setting & progress-tracking tool). You can learn more about Project Tree’s  revolutionary effect on the classroom— and about how to design your own Project Trees for any subject—  at this link:

#EarlyEd, #GirlsCanCode, #CSForALL

2016-2017: “Arts & Sciences Academy” Students Shine @ Jr Botball Event

In this ⇒ Video Clip two students on the Arts & Sciences Academy Robotics Team solve the “Serpentine Challenge” in Saturday’s Junior Botball Robotics Tournament in San Diego.

The tournament was organized by Jeff Major:

The Arts & Sciences Academy Robotics Team of Dharma and Martina were the ONLY team to solve all 5 challenges in the tournament! (their code is below the “read more” tag) Arts & Sciences Academy student Max, arriving near the end of the morning also finished 4 out of 5 challenges before running out of time!

Since the weekend’s tournament the MISD robotics team students have moved on to the second level of Jr Botball: Learning about Sensors, Light Energy & the Electromagnetic Spectrum, Digital vs Analog inputs, and more…!

Jr Botball is a program designed to get American kids playing the “game” of Math & Science at an early age. 3rd graders and up learn to program in Objective C to “teach” their robots to solve a series of challenges that require them to understand coding, electronics, sensors, simple machines, and more:

CA Math & Science Challenge:
Programming • Problem-Solving • Applied Mathematics • sTEm Design

To see the CODE the girls wrote to solve the serpentine challenge and more photos from the Tournament…

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