Let's Create!

Hello all! Its Ronalea and I am super excited because we leave for the CUE National Conference in about 24 hours!!! Before we leave I wanted to share an awesome lesson I did this week!

As we begin to explore, learn and create with 3D printer software and apps I want to make sure that my students feel comfortable creating, making mistakes, finding fixes, and using their imaginations! I read the book Iggy Peck Architect  (it did pull at my heartstrings and made me shed a tear). In this story a little boy loves to build and his teacher does not allow him to do so at school, which breaks his heart... until one day the class takes a field trip and the class is stranded on an island because the bridge breaks. Iggy saves the day by engineering a bridge to help his classmates get back to safety.

After reading this story to my students we drew our own bridges and explained what we would make our bridges out of, I love seeing how inovative my students are!!!

If you would like a blank template of the bridge pictured above you can download it by clicking here :)

 After we had our plans to build a bridge we went into our computer lab and we used Build with Chrome it was AMAZING! It allows you to build with legos, there are several tutorials your can do in the Build Academy. Before we went to the computer lab I walked them through how to build and we also got out our class legos and practiced building. A great visual for my students was when I took out the green lego base and some red rectangle blocks and I demonstrated each time you click the mouse a block builds on top of the next. When we went into the computer lab all my students were able to get on the Build with Chrome by following a link from our classroom website. This is an example of a bridge!

 This was a wonderful introduction lesson for my students to imagine, plan and create using 3D shapes on a web based platform! This was the FIRST time they used this program, I cannot wait to see what they create next time!