All of our Kindergarten students received their own personal learning devices. Both Kindergarten classes opened their boxes and began the process of personalizing their devices. We also reviewed safe online practices and acceptable use policies.
Our 7th and 8th grade girls are enjoying learning to fly drones. We spend a couple of hours a week learning fundamentals of flight and drone safety. They are shooting amazing footage to add to their websites. The websites will be published during Winter Break.
Today, two members of the SJDS Drone Leadership Team, Elle Floyd and Abbie York, worked with the 4th grade students and demonstrated several flights with our drones. Each student was allowed to see their environment from the “Drone’s Eye View”. It was an amazing experience and a valuable learning event.
This semester, students who signed up for the Robotics Programming, Engineering & Design elective have begun to work on their VEX IQ robot design. Using the engineering design process, the students create a design, build the design, and test the design on the VEX IQ playing field. Many times the initial design needs improvements so the students go back to their original design to re-evaluate it for improvements, make the desired modifications to improve their design, and then test their designed bot. This process repeats itself until its design works perfectly. It is amazing the amount of GRIT and DETERMINATION our students have!
We are practicing learning to click and drag on a mouse to develop fine motor skills and learn better mouse skills. For more practice, please go to this link.
Mrs. Tracy’s and Mrs. Lisa’s classes are official directors! We formed characters for their movies out of clay. We used Stop Motion Studio to take over 450 individual pictures to create each of the movies. We had a real blast learning how to make the characters, how to take the pictures, and how the green screen worked.
Mrs. Tracy’s Class Movie
Mrs. Lisa’s Class Movie
Our first outdoor photography shoot…
Special PK5-4th grades this Saturday!
ISTE Standards for Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions. Mrs. Burkes’ third grade students explore these standards through the use of robotics. They work in collaborative groups to use algorithmic thinking while exploring and finding solutions. Third graders break problems into component parts, extract key information, and develop problem-solving skills. They are challenged to understand how automation works and use algorithmic thinking to develop a sequence of steps to create and test automated solutions.
PK students are working on mouse clicking skills, mouse movement skills, visual discrimination skills, and order of operation skills, while solving digital puzzles.
To register, please click the link: https://forms.gle/1mQvRgZNoDxuwPpNA
https://forms.gle/1mQvRgZNoDxuwPpNA
Fifth graders began their study of marketing. The fifth graders had to collaboratively create a brand, a logo, a display, and a website to prepare for their “Shark Tank” demonstration.
The Civil Air Patrol loaned our students two STEM kits to use with our Drone Leadership Team. We had to wait for a compatible computer to run the software but Dylan, Dawson, and Chris finally got it up and running. The two computers on loan to us thanks to a grant from one of our teachers.
Students in 7th grade were challenged to create a drone rescue game that could be shared with other schools and used for competition play. Each student created a challenge of rescue that centered around a theme of their choosing. Students determined the course to fly, the manipulatives to be used, the point values assigned to each manipulative, and the time frame for their game. After presenting their ideas to the Drone Leadership Team, students chose alliances to collaborated with and formed teams to combine their ideas.
Each team is still in the prototype and development stages of their rescue missions. The final team rescue challenges will be presented and voted upon to determine the ultimate challenge.
Pre-K students learned how to code their Dash Robots and then taught other students how to do the same.
Eighth Grade Students Presented at TCCA
Saturday, October 26, 2019, Dawson Palmer, Dylan Yost, and Christopher Ayers were invited to present at the 10th Annual TCCA Educators Conference in Houston, Texas. They presented three sessions. The sessions were Artificial Intelligence Experiments in the Classroom, Drone Academy Leadership Team Year 3-Lessons Learned, and DJI Robomaster S1- The DJI Experience.
Fifth Grade
Innovative Designers
Standard: Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.
4a: Students know and use a deliberate design process for generating ideas, testing theories, creating innovative artifacts or solving authentic problems.
4c: Students develop, test and refine prototypes as part of a cyclical design process.
The Drone Leadership Team worked with 7th Grade students on their skills hovering, landing, and navigating obstacles.
TCCA is one of the largest FREE EdTech conferences in the nation. Last year’s conference had over 3,000 attendees, over 120 school districts, and over 200 sessions. Our SJDS students presented last year at this conference and were accepted to present again this year! Of the 200 plus session, only five of the sessions are student-led presentations, and of those presentations, SJDS students are presenting two of them! The Drone Leadership Team Year Three-Lessons Learned and DJI RoboMaster SI-The DJI Experience are the two presentation topics our SJDS students will speak about at the TCCA 2019 Fearless Conference. Way to go SJDS!
The TCCA Conference is Saturday, October 26th, 2019 at Davis High School in Houston, Texas.