Hi Steemers,
I would like to engage with the community to hear what others in the education sector are doing in their slices of the world by providing a short insight into what has transpired over the course of the last week in my life.
At present I am working for a company that is heavily involved in the STEM Education sector, while I continue furthering my education for those who missed my introduction post.
During the last week of August 2018, I was fortunate enough to be invited to lead a "Train the Trainer" workshop in Atlanta, Georgia in the USA. The aim of this workshop was to provide educators from various school and institutions with the technical skill for augmenting their current curriculum.
One thing that keeps me smiling when engaging with different educators internationally is when I can see their enthusiasm and passion when its comes to teaching and the joy they feel, knowing that they are the foundation builders of the leaders, inventors generation of the future.
The workshop comprised of a small group of 24 educators all located within the State of Georgia. Each individual was either a coordinator, principal or evangelist for STEM based education. The goal of the workshop was an introduction to XinaBox as a platform for education over a 2 day period.
Day 1
The workshop empowered educators with the knowledge of basic electronics simplified for classroom usage, which in turn would allow the students to easily work with technology. A brief introduction to coding was provided in environments such as Arduino and MakeCode. These types environments are ideal for simple programming which can with deeper learning allow complex projects and experiments to be conducted ,which can be traced to principals in maths, physics, science and logical thinking.
I would dare to say grammar skills as many in the software industry knows the pains of forgetting syntax.
Day 2
The goals today was to assemble a weather station, do some programming, see data in cloud and learn about basic behind analytics.
This is where things start to sound difficult, but the approach I had decided to take was to go at my training from a top down approach. The educators were provided with a small "how to guide" and with additional assistance from myself they managed to have the weather station up and running within 30 minutes.
It was at this moment that you could a shift in the room as the task placed before them had becomes a success story. The teachers who had no knowledge before today had built their first circuit, uploaded code to a device which can be considered foreign and could the results of their efforts being presented to them online.
Summing it all up
The workshop in Atlanta has been a huge success, which has been a massive boost in confidence for me which will allow to me to continue to share some of skills to empower the those who are the corner stones of building the next generation.
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If you don't already, consider following me @brendanvanbreda