Imaginative Bridges - 10 "The Hook"

Imaginative Bridges - 10 "The Hook"

The "Hook" is just as important to teaching as it is to music.  The teacher must develop a "Hook" to quickly grab the students attention.  We need something to draw the students into our lessons and our classes.  My hook is the robot.  I use it to draw students in and to keep their attention.  As you can see by my Venn-Diagram below it is the center of everything I teach and everything is related to the robots.

When presenting my projects, even before this class I have described the robots as the "hook" that draws the students in.  The class becomes about much more.  But, you've only got about 10 minutes at the beginning of the semester to grab their attention or you're going to be fighting to get it for the next eighteen weeks.

So, I grab their attention with the robot.  Then it becomes about the projects, and then finally it becomes about the outside world.  Whether that be the missing airmen we are looking for, meeting the president of a foreign country or a U.S. Ambassador.  The robot is the hook which allows me to teach even more than the STEM topics.  They learn about the politics or the Pacific Rim, World War II history, marine biology, oceanography and last week one of my students earned a paid internship at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and another earned a $10,000 competitive scholarship to study marketing at
Northwood University.

It all starts with the "Hook."  But, then the real work begins.