Third Grade SEVs Take "Flight" With MakeyMakey and Scratch

 After weeks of imagining, planning, creating, improving, painting, glueing, fixing, etc., the 3rd grade SEV's are ready to take flight. Here are a bunch of the finished projects on display in the library.

But this year, we wanted to bring a little high tech into the display...so enter Scratch and MakeyMakey. At the beginning of the year, the 3rd grade classes were offered a mini-lesson in the use of Scratch and MakeyMakey. Now, some of them made their SEV's interactive using these two tools.

Using a wand to touch 4 different areas of these SEVs, children will hear and see more information about each of these objects. If you touch the antenna, the computer will tell you what it is and what it's used for. If you touch the drill, thee will be a picture of the drill on the real Mars rover, as well as the sound of a drill.

Of course, this entire unit is the brain child of our wonderful 3rd grade science teacher who has been doing this making project for years...long before we called it "making". The Lab just helped out by adding the tech part of S.T.E.M.

We were also very lucky to have Mr. "Y" (one of our teachers from the Sullivan Center who specializes in video game design and programing) come help us one day as we wrote our Scratch program.