Science Club busy with robots
It’s 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and the 42 lively students invading Joshua Bearden’s classroom seem surprisingly excited to stay after school.
Backpacks down, the kids quickly settle into a spot at one of four rectangular tables -- the 21st century’s answer to desks in regimented rows -- and get ready to work. This is science club. Bearden started a third grade science club with 30 students last year. This year he added a science/robotics club for fourth and fifth graders. Many of the students at the tables this afternoon are alumni of the third grade club.
While Bearden, who has already taught five classes of science and social studies that day, quickly records the names of everyone present, the students watch a video on what they will be doing that day,
Then, out come the Legos.
The students work in five groups, each with a Lego robot kit. Last week they separated the Lego parts out into types, and this week and next they will build their robot, working with a step-bystep one-dimensional instruction book to assemble a three-dimensional object about the size of a basketball with protruding edges.
Each group will then spend the rest of the year “teaching” the robots to perform various challenges - to move around a square at a consistent distance of five feet, for example. This year they’ll test their work in competitions with other elementary schools in the district; next year Bearden hopes to have them ready to compete live in the national First Lego League (FLL).
In order to teach their robots what to do, the students will write programming code that they will copy to the robots’ “brains,” using iPads and Bluetooth.
That’s right. By the end of the school year, this group of 9 and 10 year olds will be writing programming code. They’ll write unique codes of their own devising, depending on what they want their robot to do.
The emphasis on STEM subjects -- science, technology, engineering and math -- in all grades over the past decade has expanded opportunities for students to show off their skills in competitions other than athletic ones, Bearden says.
In addition to the Lego competition, science students from all grades also compete in Science Olympiads. Bearden took his third grade science club to an Olympiad in Cobb County last year.
The Olympiad challenges vary in difficulty -- students may be given a handful of straws, an egg, and 45 minutes to develop a “chute” to protect the egg so that it doesn’t break when dropped from 20 feet.
Some of the other challenges are simpler, for example, Jacklyn Haywood, now a fourth grader in the robotics club, competed in the leaf and tree identification challenge last year and won a ribbon. “And there were sixth graders there,” she said, before bending back down to study the instruction book for her robot.
Bearden says participating in competitions means the kids get to be independent thinkers as well as learn how to work in teams. “They get to meet kids from other places and they get to realize there’s more to the world than just the place they live in.”
Looking around the room, there’s not a student wandering from table to table or even staring off into space daydreaming.
Asked what the secret is to keeping this many kids on task at one time, Bearden said it’s simple: You have to make the science real to them.
“I had a teacher in college I loved. He taught me that science is all inquiry based, and if you teach with a hands-on, minds-on approach then the kids get involved in the learning and it makes it real to them,” Bearden said.
“These kids, they love science. It’s not me. It’s science. I don’t even feel like I’m working, I’m having so much fun with these children.
“Science is my passion and I get to teach it every day.”