Sunday, June 7, 2009

5th grade just isn't like it used to be

This past week I subbed at Weaver Elementary, the school close to my house where I went, and where Andrew goes right now. Needless to say, he was really excited that his older sister was going to be working at his school. The first two days subbing there I was mostly outside, working with the field days that were going on. Ah, it was a tough job, working out in the nice sunny weather... but hey someone's gotta do it.

The third day, however, I was inside the building, doing actual work sorta stuff. Towards the end of the day, I looked at my schedule and realized that I was supposed to be in Andrew's class for an hour or two. I walked in and realized that his class was in the midst of working on this ongoing big robots project. Apparently they were in groups and were supposed to be building any sort of creative amusement park ride that they could come up with. They were using all sorts of little lego parts to make these creations, and using hot glue guns at time to help things stay in place. However, that wasn't the main focus of the project. They were also given some sort little mini computer thing, maybe the size of a small brick. This small brick communicated with a program on a Mac, where they programmaed it to do all sorts of movements and turns and stops and... stuff with the lego creations hooked up to the brick. So each group had their own Mac to use, their own brick thing and the lego resources to make a complex amusement park ride.

These are 5th graders. Working on a programming projects with a computer program called Robo lab. I never did anything like that in elementary school.

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