Page 23 - THE Journal, June/July 2017

“It’s fun to create art, so that helps create buy-in for the participants. So that’s why I emphasize it. It’s fun.”
–Josh Burker, The School at Columbia University
spent time having them compose through coding instead of
just writing their music or taking a test. They were able to take their knowledge to the next level, so we’re kind of building in that higher order thinking, and allowing the students to create a composition with the robot and a performance, because you can actually infuse movement as well with their xylo app. So the kids took time to create.”
Endicott, who has also used Ozobots in her music classes, said the exercise was “empowering” for her students, who still “beg” her to bring the robots into the classroom. She said that using robots in an art class, which has the opportunity to reach every student in every grade level in a school, is a great chance to interest students who may have been intimidated by technical topics in STEM education.
“Having the opportunity to teach the entire school, K-5, and expose them to this type of coding in a different kind of creative
way was a very positive thing and definitely generated that inter- est,” Endicott said, “because now instead of it being something that seems really difficult or very strategic and technical, it was more of a creative process. So I think it opened the doors to those who were a little bit hesitant at first.”
Patterson, who used to teach high school English, compared using robots to teach STEM topics to teaching older students to write, noting that they produce better writing when they understand their audience. In a similar way, robots naturally help students connect STEM topics to the real world, and “When students have a sense of why they’re doing something, they have a much stronger connection to it.”
Joshua Bolkan is a contributing editor for THE Journal based in Portland, OR.
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