Part 12: Visiting the Classroom with Smart Motors!
This is part of a series that chronicles the ongoing collaboration between Tufts CEEO and Little Singer Community School in the Navajo Nation. Click here to view the whole series.
In mid-November, I finally had the opportunity to travel to the Little Singer Community School to visit with Tom and his amazing students! The experience was the highlight of my whole year, and a huge turning point in our collaboration. Zoom calls and emails simply don’t compare to the ability to meet and work in person, and Tom and I accomplished in one week what would have taken six months to do remotely. Visiting with the students and working with them right in their own classroom was such a joy, and it allowed me to quickly deepen the personal relationships I had developed with each student and with Tom.
The visit also gave me the opportunity to see first-hand what is happening in the LSCS learning environment, growing my authentic comprehension of what these teachers and students experience on a day to day basis.
I had time to speak with every educator and lay the groundwork for future collaborations with each one of them and their students. The relationships and plans we developed that week now stand on a firm bedrock of a better mutual understanding and appreciation.
During my visit, I brought with me two versions of Smart Motor code that was recently developed by our team to be compatible with the LEGO SPIKE Prime robotics kits, which have been a primary tool for our playful learning since the beginning of our collaboration. We wanted to see what these Smart Motor projects would look like in a real classroom setting, and document it for further learning and sharing. We were lucky enough to get in touch with local Diné filmmaker Keanu Jones to film my entire week’s visit at LSCS. His mini-documentary about our Smart Motor experiments throughout the week premiered on YouTube in late December, and we are thrilled to have such a thorough and fun showcase of what our rockstar students accomplished. For promotional purposes, Keanu developed a 3-minute version which you can view here. But I highly suggest watching the full 13-minute version (embedded below) which dives deeper into the Navajo experience of engineering and playful learning. Enjoy!
