{"id":1195,"date":"2019-12-10T13:37:27","date_gmt":"2019-12-10T18:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/?p=1195"},"modified":"2019-12-10T13:39:27","modified_gmt":"2019-12-10T18:39:27","slug":"2019-year-in-review-robot-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/2019\/12\/10\/2019-year-in-review-robot-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"2019 Year in Review | “Robot Girl”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cRobot Girl\u201d
\nBy Kalyn Adams, \u201818<\/p>\n

As I approached my senior year of college at Butler University in the College of Education, I had to ask myself, \u201cWhat\u2019s next?\u201d I knew that I wanted to continue working with children, but I also wanted to further my education. I made the decision to apply for graduate school in the fall and by April of the following semester I committed to going to Tufts University in Medford, MA. I made the decision to pursue a master\u2019s degree in Child Study and Human Development with a concentration in Children\u2019s Media and New Technologies.<\/p>\n

As I researched Tufts University, I came across the DevTech Research Group directed by Prof. Marina Umaschi Bers. DevTech aims to promote STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learning for young children with a focus on computational thinking and engineering. I soon found out that Marina Bers would be my advisor and she asked me if I would be interested in working in her lab. After she told me more about the lab and the research they do, I decided that I definitely wanted to be a member of the DevTech team.<\/p>\n

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When I first began working in the lab it was my job to familiarize myself with the ScratchJr<\/em> programming app, and the screen-free KIBO robotics kit that were both developed in the DevTech Lab.<\/p>\n

My advisor was aware of the fact that I had experience teaching elementary age children and she asked if I would be willing to be the lead teacher in piloting a curriculum called CAL (Coding as Literacy). I accepted the offer because I was itching to get back in the classroom after spending a year student teaching in Indiana.<\/p>\n

I soon began lesson planning as if I had never left the classroom. I had the challenge of teaching a second grade curriculum to a K-1 classroom so I thought back to my courses at Butler that taught me what to do in situations like this as a teacher. Thinking back to my senior year at Butler, I would have never thought that I would be teaching coding to young children with the help of a robot, but I was definitely prepared for the task at hand.<\/p>\n

Every Tuesday and Thursday, I was known as the \u201cRobot Girl\u201d to a bunch of five- and six-year-old boys and girls. Every week, I collaborated with the creators of the curriculum as well as the classroom teacher to make sure the students got the most out of the learning experience. I did my best to scaffold the learning because I was working with children of different ages and backgrounds. I wanted the students to become confident in using the KIBO robot as well as gaining an understanding of what engineering and programming is.<\/p>\n

I am really happy that I was able to be the lead teacher in the pilot program of the CAL curriculum. I found that every school you work at and every group of children that you work with will teach you something new when it comes to teaching. I recently accepted a fellowship for this upcoming summer where I will be working as a youth coordinator for a multi-service nonprofit organization for women, children and youth experiencing homelessness. I am excited to work on developing a curriculum to implement during my time in this new position. Butler has absolutely prepared me for the journey that I am now on and I will always be grateful for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cRobot Girl\u201d By Kalyn Adams, \u201818 As I approached my senior year of college at Butler University in the College of Education, I had to ask myself, \u201cWhat\u2019s next?\u201d I knew that I wanted to continue working with children, but… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1546,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123336,1,11974,273677],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni-in-action","category-uncategorized","category-news","category-year-in-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1546"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1200,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions\/1200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/coe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}