One of my favorite days of the year is the RoboExpo. It’s a sweet, kid-friendly, age-appropriate celebration of robotics, programming, and physical computing for students in the Metro NYC area. I’m proud to be a founder and annual organizer along with Michael Tempel of The Logo Foundation, Lan Heng of Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Tracy Rudzitis of The Computer School, Hope Chafiian of The Spence School, Erik Nauman of The Hewitt School, Erin Mumford of Friends Seminary, and Francesca Zammarano and Javier Alvez of The UNIS School.
The line-up of challenges changes a bit from year to year, and this 2017 event included: Follow the line, Get out of the box, Stay on the table, and Collect/avoid the obstacles. This year we introduced a dance-a-long where children choreographed their robots to boogie to the tune of Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling — it was equally hilarious and magical. One child wondered if there were a Sumo Bot ring like last year, and I offered, “Maybe next year?!”
Many thanks to The Marymount School for hosting our Robo Expo for a second year in a row! (We’ve been so lucky to have a network of schools graciously offer their spaces to us over the years.) Marymount held a mini maker fair in the morning (dubbed Marymount Maker Day), so it was especially awesome to be part of a full day of programming celebrating STEM and STEAM! To top it off, I wore my prized Girls Garage tshirt emblazoned with Fear Less. Build More. Thank you for the constant inspiration and glorious shirt, Emily Pilloton and Christina Jenkins!
I had such such a great day observing a couple of classes at Chadwick International School as a prequel to Design Do Discover CI (which begins later this afternoon). @AngiChau and colleagues at The Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA founded Design Do Discover (D3). At some point, the head of Castilleja was chatting with the head of The Marymount School in New York City, so @JaymesDec got involved in planning an NYC edition of D3. D3 evolved into an annual summer event which alternates between the West Coast and the East Coast. Separately, Jaymes met Andrew Carle (@tieandjeans) and Gary Donahue (@GaryMDonahue), both of Chadwick, over the years at Constructing Modern Knowledge. This fall, Andrew approached Jaymes and Angi about launching a D3 in South Korea. I saw Jaymes tweet about #D3CI and jumped at the opportunity to be a part of this experience. Fortuitously, I planned on being in Asia anyway to visit my besties in Bangkok and help launch edcampBKK (the first edcamp in Thailand!), so it all worked out pretty perfectly. 🙂
Here are some snapshots from Gary’s class where students collaborated on Grade 4 Garden Design Challenges. I loved that the class teachers are in the classroom learning/facilitating as well:
Here are scenes from Andrew’s awesome inquiry class exploring yurts as part of a Grade 3 study of Structures:
And here are some random pics from around Chadwick International School’s campus.The school is massive and modern with lots of bright, airy learning spaces:
The littleBits pop-up retail shop in Soho is prototyping hosting Teacher Tuesdays this month. I was super honored and excited to be the special guest at tonight’s event organized by Michael Muhanna.
I introduced the Parts, Purposes and Complexities exercise (via Agency By Design out of Harvard Graduate School of Education) that I learned about in June while at Design Do Discover. As per their Twitter bio, @AgencybyDesign is “A multiyear research initiative at Project Zero investigating the promises, practices, and pedagogies of maker-centered learning experiences.”
This activity is perfect for an introductory exploration of littleBits, as it encourages individual or small group exploration of the various parts (in this case, the bits), their separate purposes, and how they fit together magnetically to form more complex circuits.
It was awesome to see familiar faces in the audience including three awesome ladies from @MarymountNY (@lesa_wang, @MaureenrReilly, and @snipskmw) who are launching a 1:1 litlltBits program staying in graders 3,4, and 5 this year. Check out their awesome tweets as they share their students’ progress and explorations!
From June 22 – July 24, I led technology projects at Marymount’s Summer STEAM Camp in the awesome FabLab Makerspace at their 5th Avenue campus. It was quite an experience to gather, develop, and run projects for campers with varying skill sets in grades K-5 for five weeks. Also, each grade level had a different and unique theme almost every week, and I challenged myself to plan integrated projects that correlated with their themes.
Thankfully, I regularly attend lots of professional development events including meetings, workshops, and conferences. Plus, I have a pretty big network of people generously willing to share ideas, so the hardest part was to research different options for each week’s topic and narrow down the choices. Blessedly, Nancy Otero (@LeSheepo) was there for the final week of camp to help with crafting automata and laser cutting gears. She’s an amazingly gifted engineer and design thinker who also leads wonderful learning opportunities at The Beam Center (@beamcenterNYC) in Brooklyn and beyond.
IE1 and IE2 in grades K-1 were the youngest campers I worked with. They met the least frequently for one or two 45-minute sessions per week. I had a set of iPads available, so after some brief instructions and examples, kids worked independently or in pairs to explore a variety of coding, building, and learning apps including Kodable, Hopscotch, Scratch Jr., Blokify, Tinkerplay, and PrintShop.
Karen Blumberg 
