TechTerra Education, a STEM education company founded in Durham, NC, along with the Boys and Girls Club of the Coastal Plains and East Carolina University, hosted a first annual STEMFest. The free event took place on August 5, 2017, at the Jack Minges Club in Greenville, North Carolina. Approximately 125 Boys and Girls Club (BGC) kids completed eight different hands-on STEM stations.
Senator Don Davis (D) and Representative Jean Farmer-Butterfield (D) met with TechTerra Education’s CEO, Susan Wells, to take in the event. “It was a privilege to see the interest Senator Davis and Representative Farmer-Butterfield showed in STEM and the kids,” said Wells. “TechTerra Education was very happy to partner with BGC and ECU for this event.” BGC vice-president, Julie Cary, and Dean Grant Hayes of the ECU College of Education also attended. “TechTerra Education was an outstanding partner and provider of all the STEM activities in which our kids participated,” said BGC’s Cary. “Club kids were highly engaged at each station and for many it was their first time taking part in such a wide variety of STEM activities.” TechTerra provided the tools, teachers, and stations for a full day of STEM activity. BGC kids tried out coding and computational thinking, digital arts, robotics, and augmented and virtual reality. TechTerra teachers helped them work with 3d modeling, stop motion animation, and drones. The kids made take home Stations of STEM passports as keepsakes. “The day was a huge success,” said Wells, “and we look forward to working with the Boys and Girls Club to bring events like this to more kids here in North Carolina and across the nation.”
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On August 22, 2017, TechTerra Education, a leading STEM education company in Durham, NC, participated in the Rowan-Salisbury School System (RSSS) Conference. TechTerra Education founder, Susan Wells, spoke on “STEM Solutions for All, Supporting Districts and Schools in their STEM Journey.”
The RSSS has been recognized nationally for work in STEM and digital learning and TechTerra Education is proud to have partnered with them for 3 years to support STEM education for all students. TechTerra Education held a nuts and bolts STEM makerspace session at the conference and provided the tools to let attendees explore robotics, coding, electronics and circuitry, micro-controllers, augmented and virtual reality, and invention kits. “Educators had a chance to get hands-on with STEM tools,” said Wells. “The chance to explore STEM resources and think about how to create inquiry-based activities for the classroom is fundamental to TechTerra’s guiding principle of STEM equity for all.” “It was great to see so much excitement for STEM,” said Wells of TechTerra Education. “We are looking forward to continuing our work with RSSS educators throughout the school year.” RSSS serves over 19,000 students in 35 schools and is the second largest employer in Rowan County. This year’s conference was held in China Grove, NC, at the South Rowan High School. By, Susan Wells One of things I enjoy most about TechTerra Education is being able to travel all over the country and to work with many different people. All that travel keeps me so busy that before I know it, time and seasons have flown by - some holidays have already passed and some holidays are just around the corner. So as I sit here today to catch my breath, I am thinking about all the places and events that we’ve been since the spring and my last blog update. TechTerra has traveled to Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Illinois, South Carolina, Hawaii, Texas, Nevada, California, Missouri and Arizona in the last months. We gave presentations, held Playgrounds, worked with schools and organizations, trained, and carried our equity throughout the STEM movement message everywhere. One of TechTerra’s stops this summer was the 2017 ISTE Conference in San Antonio. We gave presentations, held playground and poster sessions and ran a booth. More stops included working with the Boys and Girls Club in August and partnering with East Central University in North Carolina at a STEMFest. In September, TechTerra and Troxell worked together to bring STEM training and activities to four school districts in the San Diego, CA area. Earlier this month, we were in Alton, Illinois - a city that claims to be the most haunted in the US. Take a look at our TechTerra Training page for our November Makerspace Training and check out our Camp TechTerra page too. We’ll be sending out a special edition of our newsletter next month to spotlight STEM tools we love. And in the meantime we’ll be back in flight with our Southwest friends training-bound.
By, Susan Wells One of the great joys of having founded TechTerra Education is the opportunity I have to use emerging technology tools and talk to the companies about how those tools are intended to interface with STEM and STEAM integrated learning. Once I’ve had a chance to see and use new tools I also get to introduce them to my staff and into actual educational settings at Camp TechTerra and at TechTerra Training. I’m pretty particular about the tools I introduce. I want to be impressed because I know if a company’s tool excites me, then it should excite the learners it is designed for. OSMO is a company we’re excited about. We have, and use, all of their tools - especially those that are game-based. OSMO uses their gamed-based programs to connect STEM and making with hands-on exploring. Their STEM and making games include coding blocks to solve mazes, and tangrams. Word tiles lets players spell out what they see in an image on the screen. OSMO’s Masterpiece lets a user follow a design on the iPad screen on paper to create a drawing. One of their newest games, Coding Jam, lets a user create music using coding blocks. All of the games are engaging, innovative, hands-on, and interesting. Not surprisingly, all of OSMO’s games will be at all of our camps this summer. By, Susan Wells
Over three years ago, when I began TechTerra Education’s Foundations training, I started our program by first keeping in mind using the best pedagogy. I still do. I think of pedagogy as a combination of the theory, practice, methodology, and activities of teaching. In order to teach others in a meaningful and engaging fashion, we first have to understand the methods and activities of teaching. We must share this understanding with others in a manner that is relevant and retainable. Our goal is to teach the skills necessary to enable students to engage in creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. With a strong pedagogy established as our cornerstone we can bring teaching others to make the best use of technology into the process. We do this thoughtfully by using technology that is available today in ways that will prepare our learners for the ways it may be available tomorrow. Before we introduce a tool into the classroom, we fully explore what that tool can do and how it can contribute to the skills our students need. We actively track whether it is contributing to students’ learning as we expected and we modify our activities as needed if we think a change in use is necessary. We can look at digital storytelling as an example of how we work with pedagogy first. We want our students to think critically, communicate effectively be creative and collaborate, so we engage them in creating storyboards using tablets - the technology component. We may start them off with a focused question to explore or we may offer a broad prompt. We aim for far more than simple word processing. We want our students to seek information, ask questions, find visual components, look for apps that add elements to their storyboards, and produce a cohesive unique project that can be shared with others. We have hundreds of tools out there today from coding tools, to robotics, to 3D printing that potentially benefit students both in and outside classrooms provided we start at the starting point – pedagogy first. By, Susan Wells Founder TechTerra Education One of the tools we work with and love to use is Makey Makey. Their kits allow users to turn an everyday object, really almost anything that can conduct electricity, into a touchpad that connects to the Makey Makey board with “alligator clips” and then connects to a user’s computer through a usb cable. It is simple and really creative. We've tried out many everyday objects including fruit, a person, aluminum foil, playdough, silverware, and the list goes on. The concept is to allow pretty much anyone to create and invent almost anything anywhere. You just need the kit and your imagination. If you are having trouble picturing how this might work, think about this example. Let’s say you want to use your computer as a piano but you want a fun keyboard to play music instead of computer keys. So, you download your piano app. You decide to use modeling clay for your piano keys. You make modeling clay keys any shape you want, maybe you decide to make dinosaurs. Great, with your clay dinosaur keys, you clip one end of an “alligator clip” to each dinosaur. You clip the other end to the Makey Makey board. You connect your Makey Makey board to your computer with the usb cable that comes in the kit to your computer. And now, you play your piano with your dinosaur keys! It really is fun and easy! And this is pretty much exactly what students did at Iolani School in Hawaii. Take a look at our youtube video with this talented pianist. The creative potential is unlimited. Click on our TechTerra Education video: youtu.be/W_EZKaWD_cs. |
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