By Camas Frank ~
Sinsheimer Elementary School is looking for some good, civic-minded parents and other volunteers to help them launch a new after-school learning program.
As Principal Jeff Martin explained, the school recently received a grant that allowed them to purchase kits for an after-school, hands-on engineering workshop, but they need some help with staffing.
The grant wasn’t specifically targeted at any age group but teachers thought that targeting kindergarten through second grade would fit in nicely with their classes for older students in coding and robotics.
It’s hard to explain exactly what the kids will be learning without actually opening up one of the kits, but suffice to say, they’ll get the basics of circuitry and design principles.
“The junior engineers’ course will be able to accommodate 20 students for a 1-hour class before or after school,” said Martin. “All three grade levels can learn at once, but we need some parental support to get it set up soon. We talked with some and a few already signed up at Back to School Night.”
The “Little Bits” kits from VEX combine plastic pieces similar to Legos with circuitry and wiring that can be added to every day objects or clicked into place over a cardboard creation.
“It’s true that not all of our teachers know engineering or technology themselves, but at this level, kids pick it up very quickly,” Martin said, “and teachers and adults can get very quickly what they want to pass onto the kids.”
In short, engineering may sound a little too mathematically intense to turn on young minds, but the whole point is to trigger creativity and teach cooperation.
“We hope at some point to get a robotics competition team going with a school in South County,” he said. “Three or four kids working together in a multi-disciplinary environment will teach them problem solving as well as competition skills.”
To volunteer, applicants must meet the district-wide standards — pass the background check and have a TB vaccination.
Of course the adults also need to have an interest in working with kids and be good with them. The same applies to technology.
If the program proves successful it could be the start of something bigger. Last year three different coding classes taught 60 kids at higher grade levels.
