STEM workshop for future educators

Forward. Left. Left. Okay. My name is Azka Kiran and I'm a second year Phd student in science education. My students are graduate students and they're seeking license for elementary school teachers. In this workshop, we are introducing how to do programming with little kids. This course is helping them how to teach science at elementary level through activity based learning and inquiry based science methods. The bee bots are these little robots that can do like single codes like just up, down, right, left. It's mostly for kids I guess to get first level experience. So we're trying to practice that so we can implement it. And then we can do activities where they can move in different directions to accomplish a task. For us, we were just practicing like synchronized movements and mirrored movements and then attaching a pen and having them draw. When I was in my undergrad doing human development, I was in a classroom and I really liked it. I think the most fun part is being hands on. So you get to do the things yourself. So all the stuff that in our classroom we tell students to do, we get to actually practice so that we can play with them, so we can help them play with them. I think it is important for these graduate students to be in this course and learn hands on activities. Because as a teacher, we first need to learn how does it feel to be a student. And that provides us opportunity to make science relevant to real life situation. And it makes students critical thinker and problem solver. That is the main goal of STEM literacy as well.