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Applied design, skills and technologies is a part of the K-12 curriculum.   ADST is more than robots or coding or building things.  It is a mindset that encourages curiosity and exploration.  Seen in roles from engineers to artists, they solve real-world design challenges by inventing and re-inventing.

We introduced the children to a variety of materials, tools and technologies in order to encourage creative and critical thinking through design.  They generated ideas, made a product, and solved problems in their design by incorporating new ideas.  

• Kinetic Sand- create castles using this material that feels like real sand and holds it shape
• Keva Blocks – create a structure by stacking wood planks using no glue or connectors
• Snap Curcuits – build a variety of circuits that do something like turn on a light or run a fan
• Crossy Roads – develop a set of logical steps to do something
• Chatter Pix – use oral language skills to create a picture that talks
• Marble works – create a structure that uses chain reactions to move a marble through chutes
• Bee Bots – program the little robot to move in many directions  (a pre-cursor to coding)
• Tinker Toys- build structures that move
• Lego – design and build unique structures
• WeDo robot – use hardware and a software to create a robot that completes a task

Imagine standing on the forest floor . . . 

Looking up through the understory

Looking past the thick canopy

To the emergent layer reaching the sky

Imagine walking through a rainforest . . .

We have been imagining what it would be like to walk through the rainforest.  We can describe what we would see as we walked along the forest floor and looked up toward the sky. 

The children have been working on communicating information orally.  We used our rainforest model as a framework to elicit ideas and provide organization for our thinking.  First, we practiced what we wanted to say.  Then, we rehearsed speaking in a loud, clear voice using appropriate pacing, grammar and vocabulary.   Finally, we recorded what we wanted to say.

Keep checking your child’s blogfolio to take a tour of the rainforest.

On February 2, a groundhog is said to forecast weather by looking for his shadow. If it’s sunny out, and he sees his shadow, we’re in for six more weeks of winter. On the other hand, a cloudy Groundhog Day is supposed to mean that we will have an early spring.  We curious about shadows so we watched how to make shadow puppets with out hands.

Then we went outside to see if we could see our shadows, and we did so . . . we predict that we will have six more weeks of winter.