This summer I was afforded the opportunity to teach 7 rising 3rd and 4th graders in the realm of STEM. As I am preparing for my new reality of being an instructor of record upon my start at Virginia Tech, this was a great opportunity for me to truly test out my independent teaching skills.
Throughout the summer I made sure that the students brushed up on their math skills and introduced them to some concepts that they could possibly see in their new grade in the fall. Upon the completion of those lessons, the students then moved into building a robotic arm that they controlled via a remote control.
Following the success of completing the robotic arm, the students then moved on to building and programming a Lego NXT MindStorm robot. But before they actually built the robot, the students got a crash course in using conditional statements and loops as a method to write code!
Finally, the were able to build and code their robots! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see their final presentation that they had to do but they did get an idea of how to code :).