Middle and High School Students Enjoy Challenging and Relevant COVID Tech Projects

Middle and high school students at the Pioneer Valley Regional School  recently completed COVID related Computer Science (CS) and engineering projects. 

I was faced, at the start of the year, with creating curriculum for a new middle school Computer Science courses centered on Computer Science Discoveries (CSD) from http://code.org/.  I also had to create new robotics engineering projects for high school engineering students, many of whom I had last year and who had already completed some good robotics projects.  

I want students to be empowered to create solutions to pressing real-world problems.   That is our end goal ultimately, so why not start now?  So, I created two new projects that focused on COVID.  

Another challenge as that projects needed to be able to be done all remotely or with a mix or remote and in-class students.  Note that I was able send LEGO Education EV3 robot kits home if I needed to and the CSD curriculum is web-based and available from home or school.  

Middle school students learned the basics of computers and computer programing studying the key concepts of problem scoping, input, output, processing, and storage from CSD.  The standard CSD curriculum has a design your own app project at the end of the unit that I modified to focus on solving a COVID related problem.  I was impressed by how each student designed an app that strongly reflected their own concerns and interests.  

Apps designs were documented in a series of Google slides, which included drawings of the main screens.  The slides were presented by each student to students remotely and in class concurrently in a Google meet.  Here are some example slides.

Here’s a complete presentation from Rachel. Her app educates people about COVID and how to stay safe. 

 

She remarked that the project forced her to consider the perspectives of a wide variety of people, including people who were not aware of or in denial of the risks of COVID.  

It’s really fun. You get to be creative and think of things differently.  Like look at different perspectives, like looking into the perspective of people not completely understanding how they should be handling Corona Virus.

High school students were challenged to design and prototype a wearable or stand-alone robot that helped with social distancing. They went through a research, planning, building, test, redesign, and share out engineering process using the LEGO Education EV3 robot kit.  They presented Google slides to the other students, whether in-class or remote.  The two excerpted slides below are from a student whose family choose remote schooling all year, for example. 

This student, like many students during remote learning, commented on the challenges of organizing time and materials on their own at home.  This is an important skill that was forced to the forefront. I reflected on my own process that students and teachers depend on the frequent teacher student feedback loop that goes on during in-class learning.  

Here’s a complete presentation from Max, who challenged himself to use three motors.  

That rotating turret component I don’t think it’s even necessary but I decided to challenge myself and it worked out great. 

Selected middle and high school students (n=11) gave permission to be interviewed.  I asked them a few questions to try better understand their experience doing the COVID projects.  Many common themes emerged, some expected and some not. 

As I expected, hands-on (n=5) projects were perceived as fun by students (n=13 instances).  I did not expect this to be tied in with being challenging (n=5) and open-ended, the latter often expressed as not having any limits (n=5).  

I think it was really fun. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do but it was fun to think and be open to a bunch of things and possibilities because there weren’t any limitations.

I liked it. It was pretty interesting. You had to think.  

Creativity was often mentioned (n=6), frequently as a reason for the projects being fun. 

Unlike most of the school projects I found it pretty interesting and fun. For once, we actually got to use our creativity without too many like constraints to be able to do a school project. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

I was not expecting this but student responses revealed how they were feeling about COVID and may have helped students process their feelings about being in a pandemic.  Some viewed the project as being relevant (n=2) and solving a real need (n=9).

It just really made me think of a social distancing and how important it is to social distance. Other than that, like this robot isn’t a solution or isn’t a cure for the actual virus and it can just ease the situation at hand.

I think was pretty fun specially because it’s a very unique project especially since ran such like a unique time right now and I like how the project was sort of catered to what’s happening in the real world right now.

At least one student also made the explicit connection with the importance of engineering in solving COVID and other pressing issues.

Yeah, I think it did I think it has taught me that engineering is pertinent in every aspect of life – especially COVID – because you need engineers to… Say you’re doing research: you’re trying to find a vaccine, you’re trying to figure out what will prevent it from spreading, and you need to use engineering to find solutions to those problems.

Some students combined the many themes together. 

It was very interesting because I didn’t have like a certain design that I had to create and it’s like I could virtually make anything like that’s where my creative side comes in and I can take whatever is inside the kit that was given to us and create a robot and is very cool because I am a hands-on person. So, I like working on what is directly what’s in front of me instead of like working on a computer.

In summary, the COVID projects both met the curriculum goals but in a fun, challenging, and relevant way for students.  While I expected that students would perceive the work as fun and creative, I was pleasantly surprised that students found the open-ended aspect of the projects challenging in a good way.  The projects as revealed students’ feelings about COVID and seemed to help them process those feelings.