Superior Tech 4 Teachers Conference ST4T 2016

This hands-on, cutting edge coding and robotics workshop is designed for K-12 teachers and administrators who want to incorporate coding in their classrooms and schools, in order to teach abstract ideas, engineering, and critical thinking skills. The participants of this dynamic BYOD event will work on their own devices, tablets or laptops, and they will participate in a number of hands-on STEM activities designed to be applicable to students across all grades.

First, the participants will be introduced to the Blockly language, and they will work with three of the most popular visual coding platforms: Scratch.mit.edu, Tynker.com, and Code.org. The participants will be exposed to an overview of the teacher’s view and student’s view of the platforms, and then they will learn how to create classes, and advance through lessons in each of the three platforms (theory).

During the second part of the workshop (practice), participants will apply the knowledge they acquired during the first part, by using programmable robots that use the Blockly language. The participants will write small programs for machines such as Sphero, Ozobots, Dash & Dot, Sam Labs, Bee-Bot, Lego MindStorms, CanaKit, Kano kit, Makey Makey, Cubelets, and Meccanoid. Then the participants will share these lessons with each other, so that, at the end of the day, each participant will leave with at least 10 lessons, ready to be implemented in the classroom.