Spartan Treasures
The First Edition of Spartaneous
STEWARD NEWS
EVERYDAY INNOVATIONS:
Lower School Robotics Club
Robots aren’ t all silver men made of metal with red flashing eyes. When you go to the grocery store and the doors magically open for you, that’ s an example of robotics at work using the basic characteristics found in all robots, including sensors, inputs, processing, and outputs.
Through the Lower School Enrichment Program, 16 students in grades 3-5 experienced robotics programming of this caliber in the Lower School Robotics Club during the fall 2016 semester.
Led by JK-12 Technology Coordinator Robin Ricketts, students participated in one session a week after school in which they were paired together and became familiar with a robot using
LEGO ® Mind Storms EV3. Students familiarized themselves with the EV3 programming language on their iPads and connected to the robots through Bluetooth. They then wrote programs on the iPads and sent the programs to the robots to execute. These programs included sounds, motion, speed, and turning their wheels the correct way to navigate through a maze. Some students programmed the robots to sense color, touch, and distance and respond with certain outputs.
This semester, participating students in grades 4-5 will be working with LEGO ® Mind Storms EV3, while students in grades 1-3 will practice robotics with LEGO ® WeDo 2.0, Kinderlab Robotics’
KIBO, and Learning Essentials’ Code and Go™ Programmable Robotic Mouse.
Through the Lower School Enrichment Program, two different levels of robotics will be offered: an introductory level for grades 1-3 and a more advanced level for grades 4-5.
“ Robotics is the physical expression of programming,” Mrs. Ricketts said.“ Both robotics and programming require computational thinking and problem solving. There are so many parts of our lives affected by programming and robotics in some form that I think we would be doing our children a disservice by not exposing them to it.”
Spartan Treasures
The First Edition of Spartaneous
Long before this edition of The Colonnade, Spartaneous was the first“ magazine” Steward produced. During the school’ s first eight years, copies of a basic newsletter were typed and run off on a duplicating machine, according to Paul Cramer’ s A Story of Success: A History of The Steward School. Sometimes the copies came out black and white as they were supposed to, but sometimes they came out purple!
In the fall of 1980, Steward parents Mary Byrd and Jack Lewis created Spartaneous. Featuring blue print on white paper( sometimes on gold), the publication was printed using a quality printing machine, looking“ much more respectable and surely enhanced the writing of the various articles submitted by faculty and parents”( Cramer 103).
Check out the cover of the first edition of Spartaneous!
The Colonnade | 9