The "STAR" Effect

Just to wrap up our look at the bridges between Television and Film and education I would like to mention how the stars of theses shows and sporting events compel people to watch, participate or emulate their behavior.

This is something I feel we may be able to replicate in while trying to create compelling educational experiences as well.  Our younger students tend to look up to our older students and they some day want to be like the older students.

We have tried to leverage that in our robotics program  in Stockbridge.  My high school students routinely work with elementary and middle school students and classes.  The younger kids love to work with the older students and believe it or not the high school students enjoy sharing their knowledge with the younger students and it's not just the girls.  The guys in my robotics class get a lot out of working with the younger students as well.  Both groups of students are able to learn quite a bit through this.

This week our Elementary teachers asked if we could help their students build a claw for their competition underwater robot.  So we decided to teach a group of their students to build the claw and have them return to the elementary school and teach or show their peers how to build their own.

High school robotics students demonstrating robotic gripper(claw) with wrist joint

High school students working with elementary students to build gripper

Elementary students building gripper with wrist joint

Hard at work.  This went on for 3 hours during my high school robotics class and then carried over into my accounting class.

The elementary students took pictures on their IPad and made videos of this process on their Ipad so they could relay the information back to their classmates.

Heritage Exploratory Academy video of gripper demonstration

By having high school, middle school, and elementary school students work together on similar, complimentary projects we can leverage this "Star" effect to the benefit of all students.

The younger students love learning from the older students and the older students can demonstrate their knowledge my teaching someone else.  In this case my high students learned how to build a gripper and improve the grippers performance by adding a wrist joint.  They built their own and installed it on their ROV.  Then they taught the elementary students how to build the same gripper and wrist joint.  The four elementary students went back to their classroom and taught their teacher and classmates how to build a gripper and wrist joint.  That is project based learning and cooperative learning at its best.  Not to mention a multiage classroom.

The elementary students showing off their completed gripper with wrist joint before heading back to Heritage Elementary school.