Curriculum is a great guide. I’ve taught for years with no curriculum and all that freedom is a bit much and comes at a cost. When I’m designing all the curriculum I teach it takes a lot of time, especially since I have to make sure it fits within the scope and sequence of my district and is developmentally appropriate for the students I serve.
Last year we had a science adoption and we adopted IQWST for our 7th and 8th grade Science curriculum. This quarter we’ve been using the 8th grade Physical Science curriculum. Knowing what to teach and when to teach it is great. Maintaining the freedom to adapt the curriculum and even add activities to keep engaging and learning going is also a necessity for teachers since not all students react the same way to the same curriculum. We personalize when we see that the one size we are using doesn’t fit out students.
So when I saw a chance to add a highly engaging challenge to the IQWST PS3 curriculum that incorporated engineering, I did it and my 8th graders loved it! I had a set of Sphero Robots and came across the following challenge on the Sphero Edu website.
The Sphero Chariot Challenge was a perfect fit with what students were learning and added engineering into the curriculum! The Sphero Robots are a necessary part of the challenge but if you have those the builidng can be done with anything. I just happened to have a set of Knex so I offered student teams plastic cups, string, tape, popsicle sticks, and Knex.
The design phase was very much like a Makerspace with teams trying out different ideas to see what would work best. Here’s a 360 view of the students working on their designs (the 360 camera was a bit distracting – it’s a 360 video so look around by either moving your mobile device or by clicking and dragging if you’re viewing the video on your laptop):
Once student teams got their builds done they used the Sphero Edu app on iPads to program their chariots. The chariot race was to go once around the entire room. I waited until teams looked mostly done to give them a deadline and to declare race day. Not all the teams were as ready as they would have liked to be but truth is that with activities like this, there will always be teams that are not ready no matter how much time I give them.
Here are some highlights from race day:
After the races were done I gave students the following document to reflect on their learning and tie it back to the IQWST PS3 curriculum (click here to make a copy for yourself or if you don’t see the embedded document below):
This was a great detour from the required curriculum. I know curriculum designers sell their products to be taught in the order they prepare for kids to learn the concepts and to learn them deeply, but I find that sometimes adding a highly engaging activity is worth it. Even if it means that we don’t get through the entire curriculum. In the end I don’t only want kids to learn Science but I also want kids to enjoy Science. If I can send kids to high school looking forward to their Science classes, then I feel like I’ve done my job well.
