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CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. Legos come to life in the sixth grade classrooms of Pierre Van Cortlandt Middle School. Students at PVC are being mentored by undergraduate science majors from Pace University to create robots.
Undergraduate students enrolled in Pace Universitys Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems have been making visits to PVC to mentor sixth graders in the schools robotics class. The classes are under the direction of teachers Lori Peterson, Lauren Scollins and Erica Camilo.
Our students are working together in groups, with support from their mentors, to solve problems, said Scollins. The critical thinking skills they have demonstrated are played out through the high functionality of their robots. The transformation that I have seen has been wonderful.
The club originally began as an afterschool Crobotics club and grew into part of the schools STEM-D programming. The buzz word around school districts is short for the emphasis educators are putting on Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Design.
The joint effort between the PVC teachers and the Pace students is teaching middle schoolers to use Lego Mindstorm NXT kits and software to build and program robots to function at a high level.
To date, the class has conducted robot races, scavenger hunts and even a dance-off in which students programmed their Lego robots to dance to specified choreography based on the beat of certain music.
The robotics curriculum ties into the coming years math lessons and educators are hoping to use the robots in future lessons to address real world problems.
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