We know that there are lots of Robotics classes available for your middle and high school students in The Bay, we’ve reviewed and taught quite a few of them.
And here’s what we learned:
- Most middle and high-school STEM students crave answers to the How, What, and Why of the science and math they are learning in school
- Lego EV3 robots are great tools for answering those questions
“Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may remember.
Involve me, and I will understand.”
– Confucius
The main goal of our STEM education programs is to encourage students get curious about math and science and then turn that curiosity into an attitude of life-long learning.
During each and every class students are encouraged to get curious and ask questions about how math and science work in the real world. Then we we answer those questions by using hands-on experience and experiments using the EV3 robots designed to help them build upon the math skills and concepts they’ve already learned in school. We take students who ‘just learned’ math and turn them into students who ‘inherently understand’ math.
We Make Math Cool by helping our students bring math to life.
Meet StatBotics Founder: Roland Jones
Roland graduated from Queen Mary College, University of London in 1986 with a Bachelors degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and has been working in the high tech field in Europe, Canada, and the USA ever since. He received an EV3 robotics kit for Christmas in 2013, built it, played with it, and then put it away. While on a business trip to China, he discovered and started to explore the Lego educational web site, and was struck with the EV3s data logging abilities, and the way that it can put complex engineering concepts within the grasp of middle school kids. From his own experience of going through school in the 1970’s he was very aware of how math tends to be taught for math’s sake, with little practical application. Inspired by EV3’s ability to make math practical and relevant, he started to develop his Practical Engineering Through Lego Robotics curriculum, initially for his own son, but soon for other children and their parents at various after school programs. He has been teaching his curriculum for 18 months now, and is excited to be offering a summer camp with Berkeley Academy for the first time.