We hope you’ve been following along as Andy, Eduporium’s social media manager, is traveling around the country on a 74-day road trip. Though the trip is just about reaching its end, Andy still has a couple of more schools to visit. He made stop No. 7 on Monday, visiting Yanaka Bernal at the Newark Charter School in Newark, Delaware. He presented her with the seventh of 10 Merge Cube donations and got a quick tour of the school. Yanaka and some of her colleagues have some pretty cool technologies to use with their students, including a set of Merge Cubes we didn’t even know she had!
As we’ve mentioned at the start of each of these blogs, Andy has visited elementary and middle schools in Vermont, Illinois, California, Alabama, North Carolina, and now Delaware. He presented Yanaka with the seventh of 10 Merge Cubes that were generously donated to us from our friends at Merge VR. Meeting with Yanaka was a great experience and her enthusiasm and positive attitude were each immediately recognizable. She works mostly with K-2 students, but the building right next store is where the charter’s upper elementary students learn and, just down the street is another building for older students as the Newark Charter School covers all K-12 grades.
Yanaka applied for our EdTech grant over a year ago in September 2018 with the hope of expanding STEM opportunities for her students. Since the school is responsible for raising its own money to cover technology and infrastructure costs, she has contributed a lot to get her students some great tech tools with which to learn. When applying for grants in the past, Yanaka has kept in mind that technology can also help students excel in social studies classes, which makes the Merge Cube a great fit for her. The content in the Merge EDU platform includes a good amount of social studies and history-related lessons to explore.
Yanaka has already come up with a number of ways to weave technology into her social studies lessons, including the use of robotics tools. When she applied for our grant, she was interested in getting some robots to use with her students to help them understand maps and terrain. She wanted to be able to have her students program the robots to navigate tough terrain and use creative thinking to help get them safely through obstacles, like rivers and ravines. It’s this kind of simple but creative thinking that we love to see in today’s educators and just another reason we were happy to gift this Merge Cube to Yanaka.
As she’ll tell you, experiential learning is very important to her and other educators at Newark Charter. It helps to get their students thinking critically and definitely adds to the learning outcomes in their classrooms, supplementing the opportunities provided by textbooks. During Andy’s tour of the school, Yanaka also mentioned how they recently implemented a new 3D printer and a Google Expeditions virtual reality system in the school as well—another example of trying new ways of learning to better engage today’s generation of students.
Overall, the visit was great and we’re very glad to have been able to stop by the Newark Charter School! We thank Yanaka for meeting with us and for giving Andy the grand tour of the lower school building. And, as always, we thank Merge VR for their generous donation and wish Yanaka the best of luck with her newest Merge Cube in the classroom. To keep up to date with the final few school visits or to learn more about some of the others, follow us on Twitter and Instagram and be sure to check out the News & Updates section and the rest of our blog.