Oxfordian Life
Meet the New STEAM Tool
The constant search for new educational experiences, and the commitment to prepare students to face a world in which technology is the protagonist and advances at dizzying speed, has made innovation one of The Oxfordian School’s principal differentiators. It led the school to become the first private institution in Tamaulipas to implement LEGO® Education’s educational solutions in its classes.
LEGO’s SPIKE Prime, used in the fifth and sixth grades at Las Quintas Campus, is a highly useful tool in the work of guiding students on the exciting STEAM journey (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics). This set develops critical thinking, resilience and independence: skills that are essential for the future. SPIKE Prime is a practical, intuitive solution designed to build students’ confidence in STEAM concepts through learning by play.
An exciting adventure
Ms. Zamora, technology teacher, explains that SPIKE Prime “sets challenges and guides students towards achieving objectives as a team, awakening creativity through enjoyable classes and playful activities. In using a STEAM programme they develop other skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, collaborative work, communication, and handling and analysing data. It also drives our students to be more competitive in a healthy and empathetic way”.
For the students it has been an exciting adventure. “For them it is great fun: before leaving class they would not stop talking about how happy they felt, that they already wanted to know what they were going to do in the next class, and they were already identifying where they had gone wrong so as to correct it next time. They are very focused on the objective,” Ms. Zamora says.
She also mentioned that they are already preparing for the First LEGO League 2023-2024 competition, whose theme this season is Masterpiece, which will inspire students to imagine and innovate new ways of creating and communicating art around the world, as the First robotics community and LEGO Education recently announced — so the students’ enthusiasm is all the greater.
For the Masterpiece season, First collaborated with experts in the fields of museums, theatres and other creative areas to create a theme and missions that reflect what it takes to communicate with, involve and entertain an audience of any size.
Key learning
SPIKE Prime helps students learn the essentials of STEAM and develop the twenty-first-century skills needed to shape the innovative minds of tomorrow… while having fun.
It includes more than forty lessons divided into seven units, aligned with educational standards.
In the process students also develop skills for coding and solving problems efficiently through decomposition and algorithmic thinking; they apply engineering design; they carry out projects combining hardware and software components to gather and exchange data; they work with variables, data sequences and cloud data; they develop skills fundamental to the careers of tomorrow; and they build, analyse and interpret graphical visualisations of data to describe the relationships between types of energy, among much else — it even offers the option of exploring text-based coding with Python.
An international standard
LEGO Education is an organisation that for more than forty years has worked with teachers and education specialists, encouraging students in hands-on experimentation and in applying STEAM knowledge to solve real-world problems. In this way students’ desire to keep trying new things is strengthened, and ultimately they achieve more than they thought possible.
The pace of technological change means most students must prepare for jobs that do not yet exist, so LEGO Education’s ultimate aim is to equip them with skills to face the future and to motivate them to become confident lifelong learners.
The organisation RobotiX, meanwhile, has over the course of its work reached more than 250,000 children and young people with its educational programmes, with the aim of generating greater opportunities for the new generations. It is the Authorised Distributor of LEGO Education in Mexico, so implementing these tools in the academic plan is a sound investment in widening our students’ possibilities.
With LEGO® Education, students:
- Learn to investigate problems and find possible solutions
- Develop collaboration and communication skills as they share learning processes with their classmates
- Learn to see failure as a way of gathering information
- Develop an understanding of how parts work together to create a whole
