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| Fourth and fifth grade participants in Level Up Village Global Inventors/3D Printing and Global Video Game Design at Edgewood Campus School in Madison include: Ayanna Vandewalle, Alexandra McClure, Grace DeCroix, Maggie Woods, Ari Qureshi, Zoe Qureshi, Henry Maes, Lake Hick, Miller Solome, Nick Gehring, Laura Anna Koskinen, Daniel McClimon, Frankie Bautista, Jocelyn Romadka, Aiden Wiedenbeck, Blake Nelson, and William Harkin. (Contributed photo) |
MADISON — Edgewood Campus School has partnered with Level Up Village (LUV) to offer pioneering global STEAM (STEM + arts) courses as part of an enrichment activity for students in grades four and five.
This fall, the school is offering Global Inventors/3D Printing and Global Video Game Design. Throughout the courses, students are collaborating one-on-one with partners in a developing country via video message exchange. The ECS students are working with partners in Nicaragua and Ghana.
Global collaboration
“We are delighted to bring Level Up Village courses to our school to help them develop 21st century skills through hands-on STEAM projects and global collaboration,” said Lynn Koresh, technology teacher and coordinator.
“The global component of this program is especially exciting and will give students the extraordinary opportunity to work together with their partners, while simultaneously learning about their lives and daily life in the developing world.”
Innovative technologies
In Global Inventors, students learn to harness the power of 3D printing, one of the most innovative technologies of our time, to engineer solutions to real life problems. In this exciting course, they learn how to use Computer Aided Design (CAD) software to create, print, and 3D print a toy, a backpack tag, and a solar powered light source in collaboration with their Nicaraguan partners.
In Global Video Game Design, students use “Scratch” programming language to create animations and build a series of video games, while learning logic, coding, and presentation skills. Throughout the course, they learn about the Ghanaian’s daily lives and culture and incorporate that information into their video games.
Level Up Village empowers children to make a difference in the world with courses that promote design thinking and one-to-one collaboration on real-world problems between students in the U.S. and global partner students in 20 countries.
U.S. school partners directly sponsor global STEAM education in developing countries through LUV’s “take a class, give a class” model: a portion of the tuition is used to deliver the same class to students at one of LUV’s global partners, many of whom are living on less than $2 a day.
Edgewood curriculum
At Edgewood Campus School, information technology and computer science classes are taught to all students from kindergarten through grade eight.
Students in grades kindergarten through two are taught to use iPads to reinforce content area knowledge, create original work, and learn tablet proficiency skills.
In grade three, students are taught to use Google Docs and keyboarding skills. In grades four through eight, students use Google Apps for Education and various Web 2.0 tools to learn digital citizenship, pre-coding skills, digital research, and creation and presentation of digital media.
For more information about Edgewood Campus School’s technology program, contact Lynn Koresh at lynnkoresh@edgewood.edu
For admission information, email Sally Drea at sldrea@edgewood.edu