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!