Last week, I had the opportunity to travel to Roanoke, VA to present at the Virginia Children’s Engineering Convention.

Matt Caratachea and I were presenting on 3D printing. Take a look at our presentation titled “Tinkering with the Curriculum.” We had an awesome group of creative educators attend, share their ideas, and discuss how 3D printing is being utilized in their school systems.

We also had the opportunity to attend some fantastic sessions. One of the highlights for me was attending the session on Lego EV3s. Lego Mindstorm EV3 is a robot that you build, code, and control. In this session, the robots were already built for us, but we used drag and drop coding on the iPads in order to program our robot and then tell it to execute the code with a simple tap on the iPad. We estimated how many revolutions of the wheel we thought it would take our robot to get from one point to another. Then we tested our hypothesis by plugging in the code and watching it drive. Next, we tried to navigate our robot through an obstacle course made out of painter’s tape. Again, more trial and error to get the correct number of revolutions. And finally, we explored with the color sensor. Using a piece of red tape on the table, we programmed our robot to stop at the red tape and say something or move in a certain way. Thanks to a recent HEF Grant, we have 2 of these coming to our elementary team in the near future. There are definitely a ton of possibilities with the EV3s and I’m looking forward to incorporating them into our curriculum.

Another highlight was a session titled “Historic Super Heroes.” In this session, the presenters discussed how to make life-size replicas of famous individuals from history and then bedazzle them with LED lights that turn on by connecting the wires for the circuit to a battery. This was my attempt at Ernest Rutherford and his atom model. With more LED lights, I envisioned that the electrons could light up around the protons and neutrons in the atom model.

They then took the designs one step further and used the Makey Makey to control their character. What really caught my attention was their Makey Makey block. They use this wooden block design with nails and copper wiring to make the Makey Makey easier to use without having alligator clips and wires going in every direction.

Then we started brainstorming…

And a short time later, Matt had this designed in Tinkercad! I can’t wait to put our Makey Makey inside and test out the new and improved design.

Attending this conference was an awesome experience! It was great to have an opportunity to network with some incredibly creative teachers. Listening to their creative ideas coupled with my instructional technology experience, I left the conference energized and excited about trying some new lesson ideas with my teachers.