My thoughts on Lakeview's STEM Night
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of going to Lakeview Elementary in Bloomington to present at the schools STEM night for parents, teachers and students. My group was in charge of the Scratch table at the event. We ended up getting our own classroom and our own cart of iPads to teach everyone the fundamentals of Scratch. Overall teaching the students how to use Scratch was incredibly successful.
At the beginning of the night when the event had just started we didn't have that many people come by the classroom to learn about Scratch. However as the night progressed more and more kids were coming in and at one point we ran out of iPads for everyone and kids had to share! There were four of us sitting at tables throughout the classroom teaching kids how to use the different buttons and tools on the app. It was so fun to see how excited the students would get when they successfully programmed one of their "sprites" successfully. Another awesome thing I noticed was that there were kids anywhere from kindergarten to fifth grade using the app. The students creations ranged from making stories, recording their voices to make ballerinas talk and making dragons spin ten times in a row. My favorite part of the whole night was hearing students and their parents ask if they can download the app on their iPads at home and if it was free! I was so happy that they liked the game so much that they wanted to keep learning/playing at home.
Overall, I think that my group and I did a great job dealing with the amount of parents/students we had coming in and out of the classroom and teaching them all they needed to know about Scratch. In the future the only thing I might change about STEM night is having something for the parents to do as well. Whether it is having a separate presentation for them while their children are learning how to play the game or if its teaching them about the importance of coding, I think that some of the parents were looking for things to do while their kids were playing with Scratch.
I thoroughly enjoyed my experience at Lakeview Elementary last Thursday and look forward to presenting at more STEM nights in the future!
At the beginning of the night when the event had just started we didn't have that many people come by the classroom to learn about Scratch. However as the night progressed more and more kids were coming in and at one point we ran out of iPads for everyone and kids had to share! There were four of us sitting at tables throughout the classroom teaching kids how to use the different buttons and tools on the app. It was so fun to see how excited the students would get when they successfully programmed one of their "sprites" successfully. Another awesome thing I noticed was that there were kids anywhere from kindergarten to fifth grade using the app. The students creations ranged from making stories, recording their voices to make ballerinas talk and making dragons spin ten times in a row. My favorite part of the whole night was hearing students and their parents ask if they can download the app on their iPads at home and if it was free! I was so happy that they liked the game so much that they wanted to keep learning/playing at home.
Overall, I think that my group and I did a great job dealing with the amount of parents/students we had coming in and out of the classroom and teaching them all they needed to know about Scratch. In the future the only thing I might change about STEM night is having something for the parents to do as well. Whether it is having a separate presentation for them while their children are learning how to play the game or if its teaching them about the importance of coding, I think that some of the parents were looking for things to do while their kids were playing with Scratch.
I love your idea that having an activity for parents to do as well! I think maybe having more laptops for parents so they could also play with scratch to learn how to use it. That could help them understand how it works and play with kids together in the future! You girls did an amazing job! I saw the room was crowded all the time! ;)
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