When I taught 3rd grade in Korea, we used MakeBlock mBots and their respective app on the iPad for teaching geometry (angles, turns, and geometric shapes), and it was an awesome experience. The students were excited not only about the curriculum content for math, but additionally programming and coding skills. For one activity, they were divided into in small groups and worked collaboratively to program their bots to create shapes in the path that their bots took.<\/p>\n
This experience taught me that the ability to integrate technology amplified their understanding beyond just maths content. We could have used flash cards, or done an infinite amount of worksheets to name shapes and angles, but the ability to embed (pardon the pun) and use coding in their lessons helped create invaluable ties between their math lessons and their procedural writing in literacy (which we were focusing on at the time). The connection was seamless and relevant, and helped us all think in terms of our ‘central idea’ (unifying topic), as opposed to sectioning the curriculum into subjects.<\/p>\n
I was working at a very ‘well-to-do’ and affluential school, which allowed us the privilege of using whatever toys we wanted with respect to technology integration. This begs the question for me: what about less affluent schools? What about access to these tools that clearly transform the learning experience, that not all can afford?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I taught 3rd grade in Korea, we used MakeBlock mBots and their respective app on the iPad for teaching geometry (angles, turns, and geometric shapes), and it was an awesome experience. The students were excited not only about the curriculum content for math, but additionally programming and coding skills. For one activity, they were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55933,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1669384],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-auto-e-graphy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55933"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4227"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4232,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4227\/revisions\/4232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}