Mr. Baskwill has a classroom that has become a true Makerspace over the past two years. From sewing projects to robotics—his class is always buzzing with hands-on STEAM based projects! Here’s a little bit about his experience with Brilliant Labs Project funding that helped his class explore the wonderful world of coding and robotics further!
Brilliant Labs Projects at Kingston Elementary
Mr. Baskwill
Grade 5
Kingston Elementary School
I am not sure if you know it or not, but Brilliant Labs is pretty amazing. We applied for a project grant to help us explore coding in the classroom and were able to get a Sphero, BB-8 and a Parrot Mini-drone from funding from Brilliant Labs.
With these materials we had students grabbing iPads and start coding and see their code and design come to life in front of their eyes! Talk about immediate gratification! The students have been able to program, code, problem solve, troubleshoot and even teach others (we do some tech buddy work) all with help from Brilliant Labs.
It is pretty cool to watch the students in action, as they get a design/thinking challenge and how they set out to solve it. We have turned Sphero into a rescue boat, coded mazes, and run drone obstacle courses.
The skills that the students were building with each project grew and developed. It started with communication skills, and as students got different ideas to watch and listen as they planned and worked together to bring their visions to life. The second skill that really developed was their design thinking. Watching as one idea met another, changed, grew, got tested, re-tested and finally delivering a product that they were happy with. And finally an appreciation of their own hard work and thinking, as well as appreciating the design and work of classmates.
This project has been very exciting for us, and we look forward to working with Brilliant Labs in the future to see what we can create together!
