@AlainaHaws @Audra_Selkowitz and I were lucky enough to be guest speakers at Woodland Hills School District’s after school Mother-Daughter STEM Club yesterday! We had a blast sharing a little bit about our backgrounds and doing two fun activities with the students and their moms.
They created holiday ornaments by starting with a VEXcode VR project to draw a simple snowflake on the Art Canvas + Playground. They altered the project to change the appearance of the snowflake. We then downloaded their images and cut them out using a vinyl cutter, and they stuck them to pre-made wooden ornaments.
The second activity was to take a 2-D image and build it using an assortment of VEX GO and IQ pieces we brought. Students and moms made snowflakes, ramps, candy canes, trees and more!
We loved having a chance to head out of the office to share some VEX holiday STEM fun.
If you are interested in learning more about starting a Mother-Daughter STEM club in your school, sign up for a 1-on-1! We’d love to help you out!
Also, here’s the snowflake starter project if you’d like to use it!
Snowflake Template (1).vrblocks (12.0 KB)
Happy Holidays to all!
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This was SO much fun. I actually brought part of the activity home because my oldest stepdaughter wanted to keep working on her 3D design. Which then inspired the younger one and I to work on a project together too.
The older one wanted to make a gift box with some pieces to hold her present for one of her Aunts. So we talked about the shapes that go into making a 3d box, what would be needed so it could be opened and closed, and other design elements.
Then the younger one and I were looking at how we could scale up the box for larger presents. So we worked together using some ideas from the older girl in order to make an even larger box with the various VEX pieces I have in my house.
She even added the pink on the top to be a bow!
Doing things like this also helped show me just how easy it is to take activities even further – we were having SUCH good spatial reasoning conversations about how the pieces needed to be oriented, the types of connections needed, how many pieces were needed in order to make up the sides of the box, even conversations about scale! I could see this being something we do in our house as a re-themed activity for each holiday just to keep them thinking in that 3D space.
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The girls/moms really enjoyed these activities. Thanks again for joining us!
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This was such a fun experience for everyone and I had a great time sharing holiday spirit with STEM!
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