Project based learning evolves in extended learning program
Marion County Special Education Cooperative (MCSEC) Extended Learning Program (ELP) evolves through designing, building, programming, and trial runs, much like students who have been learning using the Lego MindStorms Robotics Invention System and other projects base on their interests.
Sherri Sells is the ELP facilitator for Centre, Marion, Oasis, and Peabody school districts. Susan Judd is the ELP facilitator for Goessel and Hillsboro school districts.
Classrooms increasingly contain groups of children with a wide range of individual differences, said Sells. These differences include various physical, perceptual, and mental disabilities, as well as giftedness in children who need academic challenges of various kinds.
One strategy being used at MCSEC in ELP is a "project based learning" approach.
The project approach is a set of teaching strategies helping teachers guide children through in-depth studies of real world topics.
"This approach is not as unstructured at is looks in the ELP classrooms," said Sells, "for incorporated within is a complex but flexible framework with features characterizing the teaching-learning interaction."
When teachers implement the project approach successfully, children can be highly motivated, feel actively involved in their own learning, and produce work of a high quality.
Projects enrich young children's dramatic play, construction, painting, drawing, and writing by relating these activities to life outside school.
Project work offers older children opportunities to do first hand research in all the disciplines and to represent their findings in a variety of ways.
Students also have many occasions in the course of their project work to apply basic math and language skills along with their prior and new learned knowledge and skills.
The description of a project can be like a good story with a beginning (concept), a middle (process), and an end (product), said Sells.
Teachers and children can tell the story with reference to these three phases in the life of the project.
It also is being increasingly recognized that children have a much wider range of capabilities than they have usually been permitted to show in the regular classroom. In order to show these capabilities, however, they need learning environments which are responsive to the many individual differences which influence learning.
"The Lego MindStorms Robotics Invention System is one way we are challenging students involved in the ELP program at their schools in Marion County," said Sells.
Students in Peabody-Burns, Marion-Florence, and Hillsboro school districts are involved with the Kansas Robotics League which provided four kits to the MCSEC ELP department free of charge through a grant received from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to incorporate Project Based Learning with basic math, science, and technology in Kansas schools.
These kits are in Hillsboro, Peabody, and Marion at this time.
"In order to keep these free kits the only requirement was to participate April 8 in the Kansas Robotics League Tournament at Kansas State University," said Sells.
The Robotics League is sponsored by K-State's College of Education.
Students participated Saturday in a meet to learn more about designing, building, and programming robots to perform a specific task more effectively than others.
"We took our students to the robotics meet in Wamego purely for the learning experience," said Sells, "never having participated in competition before.
"As facilitators we were as elated as our students when the Hillsboro Trojans team brought home a third place finish in the maze competition, thanks to collaboration from Derek Stuchlik of the Marion-Florence Wildcats team for sharing a program Colby Meier was able to adapt for his team's robot."
Teams only practiced robots in the maze before the competition, but at the meet teams were entered in more competitions to gain experience.
Peabody-Burns Tomahawks team members Dylan Jones and Trevor Foth stepped up to the challenge by competing in the "Capture the Flag" competition in which they placed fourth.
Derek Stuchlik and Jordan Laurin of the Marion-Florence Wildcats team took on a new challenge by competing in a newly-designed contest called "Totter Ball," developed by students in the Wamego Robotics class.
"They did not place in any of the three events they participated in, but the collaboration and cooperation between Marion County teams is to be commended!" said Sells.
Now, armed with new experiences, the teams will be preparing for the tournament at KSU.
"We hope through projects like this the ELP program will continue to demonstrate researched developments in education which have led to innovations designed to provide a wider range of learning opportunities and make the learning environment more responsive to the varying needs and interests of individual children," concluded Sells.
