These past few weeks we've been working on preparing for our big events - the Reverse Field Trips. For these trips, we bring events to three different schools in the New York City area and work with kids in grades 6, 7, and 8. The number of students we'll work with is around 70 at a time, and we'll have about 5 different sessions. We've decided to create projects that are modular and can work for the various themes that these schools have. We wanted to be able to create a modular activity that could be adapted to different themes. Themes range from Ancient Egypt to Immigration to 2D/3D Design and Deconstruction.
During one of our brainstorming meetings we came up with the idea to create city grid pages for participants to add paper shapes with circuits. the idea was to build a circuit that would represent the city and have students place buildings on this city. The students would cut out boxes, pyramids and shapes from templates, design them, color them, tape them together and then place them on the city maps.
For older students, we will have them build circuits on the houses themselves, then place their building on the map to see if their LED lights up. In other cases, we will have the students build houses with aluminum foil on the bottom, and they'll place their houses on the grid to complete a circuit on the grid and light up an LED that is already in the circuit.
For example, one group's theme is the Civil War. For this group we have a map of the battlefield at Gettysburg. We're going to build small circuits with 1 LED for each of the different troops on the map. We'll have students build the troops and when the troops are completed and all of the different blocks are placed, the LED will light up (either red or blue depending on which side the troop is on!)
We'll have a table for hands on work (cutting, coloring, taping, connecting the LED's), and a table for the actual grid for the students to go up to and place their circuits to see if they work. The last part of our activities will be the Digital Lab, where students will work with Mozilla Thimble and Popcorn and document what they've done. We've made some templates for the kids to write about what they've learned and what they love to make.
We're so excited to be able to bring our projects to the students and see what they think. We'll post after the events with our thoughts and reflections about how they went, what we learned and what we would change.
For example, one group's theme is the Civil War. For this group we have a map of the battlefield at Gettysburg. We're going to build small circuits with 1 LED for each of the different troops on the map. We'll have students build the troops and when the troops are completed and all of the different blocks are placed, the LED will light up (either red or blue depending on which side the troop is on!)
We'll have a table for hands on work (cutting, coloring, taping, connecting the LED's), and a table for the actual grid for the students to go up to and place their circuits to see if they work. The last part of our activities will be the Digital Lab, where students will work with Mozilla Thimble and Popcorn and document what they've done. We've made some templates for the kids to write about what they've learned and what they love to make.
We're so excited to be able to bring our projects to the students and see what they think. We'll post after the events with our thoughts and reflections about how they went, what we learned and what we would change.
- Claudia D'Adamo