Catholic school in Bethel Park partners with CMU to promote technology
Working on coding a Cubetto robot are, from left, Christian Cordeiro, Antonio Cordeiro and Nick Dell.
St. Thomas More School data specialist Anne Wildenhein and students – from left, Antonio Cordeiro, Nick Dell, Christian Cordeiro, Rachel Tomley and Danielle Tomley – watch the progress of a spherical SPRK+ robot that they have coded on a smartphone for movement.
Danielle Tomley takes a close look at the course for a Cubetto robot to travel.
Back when Joseph Rosi was a student, a certain science teacher made quite the impression with an astronomy lesson.
“We were learning the phases of the moon,” Rosi recalled, “and he made us rap about the phases of the moon. That was innovative back then. It was totally outside the box. We were interested in that, so it made us learn.”
Today’s students have completely different interests.
“Now, I’d have them make an interactive map that allows you to search for particular dates a hundred years ago,” Rosi said. “That’s how they’re going to learn the phases of the moon. We’re evolving to meet them where we are.”
Heading into his first academic year as principal of St. Thomas More School in his native Bethel Park, Rosi brings experience in technological instruction as a teacher and plans to continue to focus on technology as an administrator.
Aiding the cause is the relationship he has developed with Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab – that stands for Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment – by participating in the first year of the lab’s Fluency project while teaching in Bethel Park School District last school year.
“The Fluency project is a big attempt to understand best practices in education, and learning from teachers about how these tools can best support student inquiry, student voice and student agency,” project manager Jessica Kaminsky explained.
This school year, the Fluency project is launching a pilot program to focus on tools for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, those at St. Thomas More included, to use technology and data to ask questions about their environment, tell stories and articulate arguments.
Educators also look to benefit from what the CREATE Lab representatives have to offer.
“Those folks are going to provide support for us to learn about data fluency,” Rosi explained. “We’re going to teach the adults in this building how to use this data to inform their instruction and how to teach kids.”
St. Thomas More also has taken steps in that direction internally.
“We’ve hired or reallocated staff to have two technology coaches who are working in the building, one for middle school and one for elementary,” the principal said. “The goal for that is for those people to work with their grade-level counterparts, the social studies teachers or the Grade 3 teachers, to find way to integrate 21st-century skills into their normal curriculum.”
One of the technology coaches is health and physical education teacher Shannon Zimmerman, who provided an example of how computers can benefit students on a real-life basis:
“You can do things like logs to keep track of what they eat daily, not to count calories, but just to know what they’re eating,” she said, particularly with regard to components like sugar and carbohydrates. “They’ll learn what those words mean, and they’ll see the numbers that they’re intaking.
Kindergarten teacher Lily Mellott also joins the staff with a firm grasp on the value of technology in education.
”Especially in kindergarten, you need hands-on, engaging content, or you’re going to lose them,” she said. “At 6 and 7, a lot of them have iPads. A lot of them have tablets at home. So it’s not anything that I would be so worried about them learning to use, because they pick that stuff up so quickly.”
A crucial aspect is for the learning tools to be of actual use to students.
“One of the big philosophies of the CREATE Lab is technology for more than just technology’s sake,” Kaminsky explained. “I think there have been so many times in education where we’ve seen, say, a SMART board put into a classroom, and it’s basically just an overhead projector, but a little bit fancier. There’s not much of a value add to having that kind of technology.”
St. Thomas More looks to add value through the technology of robotics by having students learn how to code by controlling the movements of such youngster-friendly devices as the six-sided Cubetto and spherical SPRK+.
“Maybe through literature, we write a story about the robot. Or through math, we calculate angles and speed,” Rosi said. “Or for science, we’re learning about the servers and how they work with robots. There really is a cross-curricular opportunity that allows you to immerse the kids.
Plus it’s fun, maybe even more so than rapping the phases of the moon.
“We’re tricking the kids into learning,” Rosi posited. “I don’t mean to be so cavalier about it, but it’s really the truth. Hey, I could sit here in front of you and teach you general physics concepts. Or I could say, ‘We’re going to launch this robot, and you’re going to write the code to do it.’ We’re achieving essentially the same thing.”