Yes, it's May. Yes, Wonder League started in October. Here's a post that explains our season, which really just ended in late March!

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love coaching robotics. I was able to coach middle school Lego League and high school FTC club teams at my previous job, and I was sad to give up that opportunity when moving to a K-4 school. Thankfully, Wonder League came along just when I needed it! ((Here's a shameless plug for my favorite HS robotics moment ever.))

Wonder League is a new(ish) league in it's 2nd season, with a 6-8 age division and a 9-12 age division. I decided to open this up as an after school club for our second graders, since third and fourth grades get to do our tech club. I expected about 20 kids to sign up and had 38 instead. Thankfully, Dustin Schneider and Kendra Hanzlik came to my rescue and helped me out with the club.

So, we split kids into 8 teams and set to work! We spent the first week learning how to code in the Wonder app.

Then, we learned about the missions. Here's the video introduction for the 5 missions that teams had to complete:

Our kids met after school for an hour every Tuesday night for 8 weeks and all 8 of our teams completed every mission! It was a huge accomplishment!

Here are the videos of each team and each mission:

During winter break, I found out that two of our teams had accomplished a perfect score! We were the only two teams from Iowa in the 6-8 age bracket to have a perfect score, which meant we were finalists in the world competition! So, those two teams met for 4 more weeks after school to accomplish the final mission. Both teams got their solution to work!

These kids worked so hard to come up with these solutions, and they also had to turn in a portfolio of their work and an introduction video that showed around our school. Many of our competitors in the final round were kids who are part of homeschool programs who have extra time to work on this and our kids accomplished everything in under 5 hours, total! We were all VERY excited to see those balls get in the cups!

Unfortunately, we didn't place in the top 5, but our kids had such a great time and learned a LOT and had tons of fun along the way!

Here's all of the kids with their certificates for completing all five missions!

Addy, Dane, Josie, Sam, Rylee

Willem, Aida, Jack, Kendall

And all of our finalists with our t-shirts that finally came in! There were over 5,000 teams that competed worldwide, and we were in the top 30 in our age range--that's top 1%! Again, I'm so proud of these kids! 

You can check out the winners of the competition here.

Wonder League 16-17

Yes, it's May. Yes, Wonder League started in October. Here's a post that explains our season, which really just ended in late March!

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love coaching robotics. I was able to coach middle school Lego League and high school FTC club teams at my previous job, and I was sad to give up that opportunity when moving to a K-4 school. Thankfully, Wonder League came along just when I needed it! ((Here's a shameless plug for my favorite HS robotics moment ever.))

Wonder League is a new(ish) league in it's 2nd season, with a 6-8 age division and a 9-12 age division. I decided to open this up as an after school club for our second graders, since third and fourth grades get to do our tech club. I expected about 20 kids to sign up and had 38 instead. Thankfully, Dustin Schneider and Kendra Hanzlik came to my rescue and helped me out with the club.

So, we split kids into 8 teams and set to work! We spent the first week learning how to code in the Wonder app.

Then, we learned about the missions. Here's the video introduction for the 5 missions that teams had to complete:

Our kids met after school for an hour every Tuesday night for 8 weeks and all 8 of our teams completed every mission! It was a huge accomplishment!

Here are the videos of each team and each mission:
During winter break, I found out that two of our teams had accomplished a perfect score! We were the only two teams from Iowa in the 6-8 age bracket to have a perfect score, which meant we were finalists in the world competition! So, those two teams met for 4 more weeks after school to accomplish the final mission. Both teams got their solution to work!

These kids worked so hard to come up with these solutions, and they also had to turn in a portfolio of their work and an introduction video that showed around our school. Many of our competitors in the final round were kids who are part of homeschool programs who have extra time to work on this and our kids accomplished everything in under 5 hours, total! We were all VERY excited to see those balls get in the cups!

Unfortunately, we didn't place in the top 5, but our kids had such a great time and learned a LOT and had tons of fun along the way!

Here's all of the kids with their certificates for completing all five missions!

Addy, Dane, Josie, Sam, Rylee

Willem, Aida, Jack, Kendall

And all of our finalists with our t-shirts that finally came in! There were over 5,000 teams that competed worldwide, and we were in the top 30 in our age range--that's top 1%! Again, I'm so proud of these kids! 

You can check out the winners of the competition here.

4th Grade Tech Fair 2017

Last week, as part of our Prairie Hill STEAM celebration, 4th grade students got to show off their work on their independent projects. All students in 4th grade have the option of completing a project by themselves or in a group to present at our Hill showcase. We showed kids some past projects and some other options. This year, we gave them the choice of doing a technology project, or a science project. We had about 30 kids work hard and present their projects to our school last week.

Of those 30 kids, I worked with a few other teachers to select 3 projects that would move on to the ITEC Student Tech Fair in Coralville. This tech fair is open to all of Eastern Iowa and had 58 projects showcased. We selected Cole Younger and his video game, Hannah Hughes and the app she created, and Jayson Kubik & Drew DeSmidt for a virtual tour of our school. 

Hannah created an app that teaches about gymnastics. She took her own videos of moves she wanted to teach, designed her own logo, and worked with 4th grade teacher Tricia Ward to put it together in an app using appsbar.com. To see and download her app, click here!

Drew & Jayson wanted to make a virtual representation of Prairie Hill. We borrowed a Ricoh Theta camera from my friend Stacy at GWAEA and they took pictures of every area of our school. They put those pictures on a website they made, as well as uploaded them to Google Maps. New students and teachers can get a feel for what our building looks like before even stepping foot inside. My favorite *might* be the picture of the library! 

Cole made an awesome video game called Run Frog Run using Bloxels. He worked really hard to create 5 levels where the frog is trying to destroy the evil bunnies who have kidnapped his friends. He used both the physical blocks and did a bunch of coding on the iPad app to make this game. You can play the game online by clicking here and then scrolling to the bottom and typing in 7676 x 23232 for the coordinates to warp to his game. 

I am super proud of all these kiddos! They did a great job presenting their projects in front of adult judges and peers and representing Prairie Hill.

And of course, as a special treat, we stopped at Coral Ridge Mall to eat lunch. And what kind of teacher would I be if I didn't treat them to ice cream for their hard work?! And naturally, we had to take an ice cream selfie. Not sure if the kids or teachers enjoyed ice cream more...and special thanks to Jill Novotny for joining us! It was a great day!