As we wrap up the school year and enter a long weekend, let's take care of some business first. We've awarded our $500 EdTech grant for the month of May to Marylin Prysi! Marylin is a teacher at the Villas Elementary School in Fort Meyers, FL and currently designing a STEM lab. She works with a large amount of minority students and helps create beneficial STEAM experiences for them to learn and grow together. Our entire team sends congratulations to Marylin for her selection! We also thank her for her application and for her commitment to creating 21st century experiences for her students.
Villas Elementary is a Title I school in the School District of Lee County with over 80 percent of the student population falling into minority categories. As they wrap up this school year, Marylin is certainly looking forward to next year—especially to getting students back in the building (hopefully) full time. She's also looking forward to it because she's been approved to create a school STEM lab! It's looking to be ready for the start of the school year and Marylin is hoping to create some new hands-on learning experiences in addition to the ones she's facilitated in the past.
Even in the last year, Marylin helped inspire students with various types of STEM programming. She dubbed her efforts 'virtually unlimited learning' and collaborated with a bunch of different professionals to introduce students to everything that STEM careers have to offer. Her efforts saw her team up with authors, museum curators, engineers, and even park rangers to help deliver these creative STEM experiences to students. She also worked to align all of these lessons to state education standards.
Now, as the school year comes to a close, Marylin is looking forward to the opportunities ahead. She will be transitioning into a new role as the leader of the school's media center. This is where she will be creating and running the STEM lab once the school year begins. She is planning to continue some of these virtual sessions, but also hopes to design follow-up activities so students can try hands-on projects related to some of the things they learn about—a perfect connection between real-world careers and makerspace experiences!
Currently, there is no funding in the school's budget for materials used in the STEM lab. Marylin is relying entirely on donations and pursuing as many grant opportunities as possible. Some of the tech tools she hopes to acquire and implement in the coming months include weather equipment, electronics and circuitry tools, robotics kits, and chemistry sets. As part of the award, we're planning to send Marylin a group of Sphero Mini robots and accessories! She'll be able to use these for all types of hands-on learning and scientific experiments in the STEM lab. We definitely look forward to seeing what her and her students do with them!
Marylin also plans to utilize the Sphero CS Foundations content to improve her coding instruction and use of the robots. Once she's more fluent, she hopes to jump right in to teaching robotics lessons. For many students, this will be their first taste of educational robotics. Marylin, however, knows the importance of hands-on STEM activities and helping students develop problem solving, critical thinking, and creative skills. It's also great that she's planning to introduce them to these exciting and important disciplines at a young age!
Once again, we congratulate Marylin on her selection and thank her for her application! We look forward to seeing how the Sphero Mini robots impact productive learning experiences in her STEM lab this year. If you would like to apply for our next grant award, the application for June is now open. You can apply here any time up until June 20 to be considered. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for more!