It’s the start of the month, so that means we have news regarding our $500 EdTech grant from last month. For the month of February, we’ve awarded our grant to Michelle Shea, who’s a librarian at Texas A&M University Central—the first time we’ve given the award to somebody in higher education! Michelle is involved with some great STEAM education programs and a camp within the library. And, for her grant, we’re going to be providing her with some new EdTech tools to help enhance her efforts!
Michelle works in the TAMUCT library and she’s led efforts to expand the kinds of activities that take place there. Specifically, she’s helped organize a free coding camp for middle school students, taking advantage of the space and some of the equipment the university’s computer science staff already has. The camp is for local middle school students in Killeen, TX to learn fundamental concepts of coding through hands-on exploration.
Running a camp with campus staff.
Partnering directly with computer science faculty, Michelle is working on developing a full camp curriculum for the students who attend, focusing on computer science concepts, like loops, conditionals, events, and more. She is planning on exposing the students to both block coding and text coding and she’ll even be collaborating with some of the university’s students for input on the instructional methods for the camp.
The camp's goal is empowering students to move from concrete learning to abstract learning with plugged and unplugged coding challenges. Michelle also wants to get the local community more involved in the camps and give children who are less likely to partake in these kinds of learning experiences the chance to do so. She’s going to be putting the word out to middle schools all around the area and hopefully attract as many students and parents as possible to try out the camp at TAMU Central.
Facilitating summertime STEM.
Michelle and her colleagues are designing the camp around teaching students the basic concepts of programming, including logical understanding—a skill they can transfer as they continue learning more complex coding languages. She also wants to ensure each camper learns enough about coding to solve at least two or three specific challenges. This will help them to see the progress they’ve made and what they might need to work on. Ultimately, Michelle just wants to inspire kids to take part in coding as much as possible. Ideally, she also wants to inspire as many as possible to study computer science in the future.
The camp will debut sometime this summer and Michelle has already begun thinking about visiting local schools to promote it. It will be their first camp specifically for middle school students, which we’re excited to help with! We're awarding Michelle some micro:bit kits, PivotPi kits, and the MonkMakes sensor for the micro:bit—some great technologies for coding!
Students can program the micro:bit in various languages, so it will definitely be a great addition for this camp. Options for coding with the micro:bit include JavaScript blocks, Python, and a whole bunch more! To follow updates from the coding camp Michelle is running, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We also encourage you to apply for our EdTech grant award for the month of March. The application is now open and will remain open until March 20! Or, contact us to learn about other ways we can help educators who have interest in applying for EdTech grants!