Before this round of the Young Innovator Program, we sent out a call to our local university to see if there were any students who wanted to come along as learners and helpers during the period of our Young Innovator Program in Term 3. We knew we would appreciate the help but we also recognised that this program would provide a perfect learning opportunity for these Education students – some in their final year before entering schools. After attending the Griffith Uni Digital Technologies Summit and sharing our story there, we were aware that universities were keen to discuss ways of better preparing their students to enter a world where the use of the digital was normalised. We considered that a school based program such as this one, which enabled a learning environment where potential teachers could work with teachers, experts and students to be an excellent model for doing this.
We had four willing participants – Fiona, Tari, Molly and Ashley – all from QUT.
Fiona is working with a group of arduino programmers. She is enrolled in the Master of Teaching. Within the group there is Mr Sansness (Year 5 teacher) and Mr Burow (our electronics parent expert). Thus far they have used a Makey-Makey to understand the idea of circuitry, creating an ‘Operation’ style game, constructed some mBots (which are programmed via arduino) and are looking forward to moving more into the arduino programming side of things in coming weeks.
Molly is working with the Junior Coders. She is enrolled in a Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood) and is a third year student. Tari is enrolled in a Master of Teaching (Primary) and also working with the Junior Coders. They are both working with myself, Mrs O’Connor (our lower primary ICT Integration specialist and Mr Baker (our principal). In this group, we have been looking at Scratch Jn as a junior coding option and then a range of activities designed to enhance computational thinking. This has included some movement games, the use of Dash robots and a visit by the Ashgrove Library with ozobots.
Ashley is also at QUT. She has been working with the ‘Create a Digital Game’ group which is using Scratch coding to do this. Emily de la Pena, the creator of ‘Coding Kids’ and an AdvanceQLD Digital Champion is leading this group. It’s such a wonderful opportunity for Ashley!
During this last week we also had a visit by the Ashgrove Library staff – looking at ozobots.