Lesley STEAM has been participating in a series of Somerville STEAM Socials. Organized by the newly formed Somerville Education Foundation, the evening events gather local organizations, educators, and families to learn how more about making and STEAM education in Somerville.
On May 21st, over 150 Cambridge Public Schools (CPS) families and students converged in the Kennedy-Longfellow School (K-Lo) dining hall for an evening of creative robotics, prizes, and pizza. K-Lo hosted the first ever CPSD “Robotics Playground” with the idea of sharing out classroom robotics and engineering curricula. K-Lo was in good company — with teacher and student teams from the high school, Amigos, Fletcher Maynard, King Open, Tobin, 8 middle school volunteers from Putnam Ave, and Ingrid Gustafson, who represents all of the middle schools.
We had a host of special guests, including Superintendent Young and Assistant Superintend MaryAnn MacDonald, two school committee representatives, Fred Fantini and Patty Nolan, Terry Gist, President of the Cambridge Education Association, a representative from the City Councilor Nadeem Mazen’s office, reps from the Best Practices group in the STEAM initiative being coordinated through City Hall, a representative from the Cambridge Expanded Learning STEAM Network, the director of the Elementary Education program at Lesley University, and 4 parent representatives from the KLO Site Council.
The Cambridge Expanded Learning (EL) STEAM Network hosted an evening full of rockets, robots and race cars; providing an open space for students of all ages to engage in maker-minded activities. Families and students gathered at the Peabody School on Wednesday, June 17th to enjoy hands-on activity tables including: making their own “edible” race car, an interactive splatter paint pendulum, creating music with the MaKey MaKey, and pressure powered rockets.
Over 150 family members, students, staff and friends of Kennedy-Longfellow School and Lesley joined us on Thursday, December 6th in the school cafeteria to celebrate the launching of the Raspberry Pi program. The energy was buzzing and the pizza flying as the evening launched with welcoming remarks from Mrs. Gerber, KLO Principal. Mrs. Gerber recognized the partnership donor, Al and his wife, Anne Merck, in addition to the Lesley President Joe Moore, Dean Jack Gillette, Chief of Staff MaryPat Lohse, CPS Superintendent Jeffrey Young, and of course, KLO student and staff volunteers. Pi logo and name contestants were jittery with excitement as the winning entries were called. The winning logo and name are proudly displayed on each of the finished Pi Packs (now called the “3P K-LO” with the 3Ps standing for “portable pi pack.”
The evening capped off with the afterschool Scratch Club sharing their projects that they have been working on for the past several weeks. Scratch is a kid-friendly programming software developed by the wonderful folks at the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten department. The KLO nine Scratchers, grades 2-5, meet weekly in the computer lab to develop and share game and animations. Special thanks to John Maloney, Research Specialist at Lifelong Kindergarten and senior Scratch developer, for attending the Pi Launch party and sharing in the excitement.
Some of the logo entries from the Raspberry Pi contest
For more information about the evening, see Partnership with Cambridge School Integrates Technology in Classrooms