Chagrin Falls School News

March 7, 2019 by Staff Report

Coding Club Builds Robots

Gurney Elementary School kindergarten teacher Kelly Purcell, along with tech integration and instructional coach Nancy Kevern and high school computer science teacher Carolyn Petite, organized an after-school free coding club for third-grade students as well as high school programming students. The February Coding Club meeting allowed third-graders to work with their high school buddy to program Dash robots to draw with a marker. Dash Robot, a product of Wonder Workshop, allows students to create anything they can imagine. Dash is a real robot that responds to voice commands or any of the five free downloadable apps to sing, draw and move around.

Students started off drawing a heart for Valentine’s Day, but quickly moved on to drawing more complicated things like stars and letters.

“The students were so incredibly engaged in this that they moved on to drawing on paper instead of whiteboards so they could take their creations home with them,” said Purcell.

Static Electricity Lessons

Gurney Elementary School second-graders in Jillian Langer’s class enjoyed their recent lesson on static electricity. The lesson was part of their forces and motion unit in science.

“We learned about contact and non-contact forces, so static electricity was one of the non-contact forces,” said Langer. “In this lesson, we first rubbed a balloon on the carpet or a sweater, then picked up bits of tissue paper–like confetti–with the balloon without touching the balloon to the tissue paper. We also made a soda can roll across the table without touching it to the balloon. The class was really motivated to use the “force” and even did ‘soda can races.”

With the experiments, the students now understand how some forces such as static electricity, gravity and magnetism act on an object without physically coming in contact with it.