With the new school year quickly approaching, I am thinking of holding a district wide VEX STEM night using VEX 123, GO, and IQ. Possibly 2-4 times throughout the year. Has anyone else done this? We are using most of the STEM LABS and Activities from the website in the classroom. I’m looking for additional activities we could use. I’d love to hear about how others may be do something similar to this. Or any ideas people are willing to share to make it successful. @Nicole_Champagne @Audra_Selkowitz @Aimee_DeFoe @Alaina_Haws @Desiree_White-Price @Danielle_McCoy
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@Tina_Dietrich, at my building this past school year, I helped out by running the VEX portion of our STEM night. I had set up the Mars Competition field with a Chromebook and code base, then I also displayed 2 spirographs that the 5th grade classes created. Students of all ages enjoyed driving the codebase, especially when they successfully lifted the spaceship! The spirographs were a hit because the families could take their post it’s home with them as a “souvenir.” I’ve participated in a few live sessions in the Spring,
and I’d be interested in incorporating some of those ideas! I like the idea of having more STEAM nights… maybe with monthly themes???
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@Danielle_McCoy and @Tina_Dietrich I LOVE the idea of community STEM nights - it’s a great way to get families connected to what their students are doing in a hands-on, low stakes, fun-filled way. There are so many Activities that you could riff on to bring something to life - the Competition games are a GREAT place to start!
You could also take a look at the Hour of Code activities from this year - we put together Castle Crasher ‘Across the Continuum’, which could be a nice themed way to connect multiple platforms (and who doesn’t love to build and crash castles?!)
I think it could be really neat to recreate an activity than you’ve done with students, where the student is put in the role of “teacher” and they get to facilitate the activity for their grown ups. This brings kids’ learning to life in a little bit of a different way, and really gets families and caregivers bought in in a different way. You could have classes help you plan for these kinds of nights - or even develop their own activities to share with the community!
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I love this, was thinking the same way. Get the students to lead the STEM nights!
