About a month ago, our Bambu X1C printer arrived.  Here is the first part of our journey.

For this post, I am going to go from the end to the beginning of how this happened.  I wanted to start out with the interviews that the mentors recorded of the young designers with their completed bubble wands.  Please click below to be able to hear different young designers sharing what they learned.

Today was the culmination of several weeks of collaborative learning where both 7th and 8th grade designers helped their kinder partners create both their first 3D printed bubble wand as well as an Infusible Ink Bag for each young designer.  It was an adventure of learning together.

I applied to become a Glowforge Educational Ambassador.  Check out the impact that this powerful tool has provided my designers through the InfyMakers Award.

These last few weeks have been a serious struggle for me.  At times I feel like what I could do and what I am doing are so far misaligned that I become frustrated and question what I do.  I am not always able to see what is working when it feels like everything is not working.  

In 2021, I started reaching out to my colleagues from my former elementary school because I wanted to continue to build on the technology experiences that I had been doing in my previous role as an Educational Technology Coach at K-5.  I wanted to continue to collaborate and learn with educators who had trusted me to work with their students when sometimes I didn't know what I was doing. 

Our first mentoring with 7th or 8th grade and kindergartners started in the spring of 2021 when we still needed to sit 6 feet apart.  Using yoga rugs and meeting outside, the kindergarten team was willing to work with me and provide my 7th and 8th graders the opportunity to mentor.  This was the start of the mentoring program that our 7th and 8th grade technology students do for our K-5 school.   

In the past year, the Infysys Maker grant helped immensely to provide more technology like the Glowforge.  While our local Verona Area Educational Foundation provided two different grants to help cover the cost of 3D printing, Infusible Ink, and more.  This year we have been continuing to work through both the highs and the lows because when older learners and younger learners connect magic can happen.

Sometimes I've had to slow down and just watch what is happening instead of what I think should be happening.  Today was one of those days.... a 7th grade group that has been struggling transformed into the most amazing group of thoughtful and caring mentors.  To be able to see the connections and the impact that both the older and younger learner are having on each other's life is truly the "why" of mentoring. 

Thank you to Jessica Reed for capturing these moments today and always being willing to navigate this crazy path of collaboration!

​Thank you to Kelsey and Matt with CodeJoy for the amazing free learning webinar about Finch robots and coding.

Using Cricut Design Space to create an infusible ink bag designed for their kinder buddy to hold their 3D printed bubble wands, designers shared the first Morphi designed bubble wands that have been printed.  They also created together using the Micro:Bit.  Fridays rock with mentoring!

In this mentoring, mentors were paired together and then worked as a team with 2-3 kindergartners.  This has helped with the anxiety that many of my mentors experience at first when starting to work with a younger buddy.  ​

I choose to use the Challenge Central lesson from Makers Empire as part of the framework to do the Design Thinking Project with a focus on our community.

I have blogged on previous parts of this unit - Hummingbird Posts.  Watching my designers engage in creative robotics using simple tools like cardboard and creating amazing robots with the integration of servos, LEDs, and sensors, has been the missing part in my curriculum.  I don't want my designers to just program robots, I want them to create from the beginning to the end.

In the Simple Robots Flip, you can see how designers started with iterations that quickly evolved.  The designers then took their designs and shared them with their fifth grade partners.  Several groups even had their partners add to their design.  This unit has reinforced my belief that computer science and making are powerful tools for unleashing creativity at any age.

Each designer keeps their original prototype before teams select the final designs that they will create and sell.

The Tech Music mixtape (click on the picture above) captures just a little of the amazing diversity of how music and technology blend to create powerful creation opportunities for our designers.

I love using the Mixtapes with Flip because it allows designers to share with each other and enjoy the diversity of how music is created.

My favorite design challenge of this week is the Micro:Bit recycled cardboard instrument.  Designers really take this challenge to another level with their ability to incorporate different recycled materials and programming the Micro:Bit to play a song that they have designed.

This past fall while visiting Lee Briggs classroom at Toki Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, I was inspired by how he had created different learning certifications for the tools he has in his classroom.  It took me several months and some great shared resources to create my own version for our 3D printers.

I also focused on four design programs that we use - Tinkercad, Cookiecad, Morphi, and Makers Empire so that designers would learn how to create and not just find and print other designer files.  The certification consists of ten 5 minute or less videos.  Upon completion of the certification, designers earn $10 towards their design budget for our classroom.

This week designers explored the four different sensors in their Hummingbird Robotics kit.  Using Kelsey and Matt's tutorials, designers learned about how to use the different sensors.