Moreton Bay Regional Council and Innovate Moreton Bay provided local teachers the chance to get hands-on experience to up-skill in STEM Education at the Teacher Professional Development Coding & Robotics Workshop.
Hosted at USC Caboolture on Thursday, 21 July and USC Moreton Bay on Friday, 22 July, this event was aimed at providing Secondary education teachers within the Moreton Bay Region with the opportunity to better understand teaching tools and methodologies to support the development of new programs related to coding and robotics.
The workshop provided an in-depth insight into how teachers can access coding and robotics hardware as well as how to incorporate this technology into their own course curriculum. The primary objective of the Teachers Coding & Robotics PD Workshop was to create a collaborative network of teachers across both private and public schools in the region and aid them in developing their skills surrounding this topic to create further opportunities for youth innovation and entrepreneurship.
This training will allow teachers to deliver programs that use strategies known to increase student interest in STEM: hands-on learning, working as a team on real-life problems, and culminating celebration where students can showcase what they created and learned.
Working in pairs, participants were provided with the latest LEGO Spike robotics platform. The emphasis was on the coding of the robots but there was be a broad-based discussion on activities that you can do in the classroom to teach students how to consider engineering problems.
Participants also took part in a discussion on how teachers can implement the world-renowned FIRST LEGO League program into their assessment programs including mapping this program to ACARA and examples of real-world assessment items that can be implemented at middle school (year six to year nine) level
This session was proudly delivered by FIRST LEGO League - FIRST Australia.
Delivered by STEM Punks, participants were taught how to apply STEM Tools including Algorithms & Coding to solve real-world problems. They explored how Design Thinking can be used as an innovative process and look at problem-based learning scenarios linked to the Australian Curriculum.
Through this session, participants were able to build confidence using STEM Tools in real-world problem-based learning scenarios, understand how to embed Digital Technologies into the classroom using an integrated approach, apply Design Thinking as an innovation and problem-solving process and understand how to create immersive and cross-curriculum experiences for students
For more information about Council’s innovation programs see: www.moretonbay.qld.gov.au/innovation