MindLabs Energy and Circuits Classroom Set
- Grades: 3+
- Number of Students: 28 (7 groups of 4)
- Number of Lessons: 8-10
- Content Hours: 4-6
- Additional Resources: How to Guide
Highlights:
MindLabs Energy and Circuits Class Set, simplifies your implementation of hands-on and engaging activities to teach STEM standards like energy, through engineering. Reduce material management headaches from dead batteries, LEDS or other defective or broken components!
Students can learn key concepts while creating and repairing their own circuits using virtual components. All it takes is a card set, a mobile app, and a mobile device or tablet – set-up and clean-up is cut to minutes. Classroom research has shown the activities to be engaging, effective and fun, making it a great way to get students excited about STEM subjects.
Grading has never been easier, a group report is automatically generated for later, while an activity log keeps you informed of classroom activity.
Gain Valuable Insights
Educators value process and growth over outcomes in STEM learning. Using the Engineering Design Notebook, students can record their science and engineering practices while creating and testing their designs, as well as collaborate in teams and utilize self-awareness check-ins.
Educators have access to a Web Dashboard that gives live updates and alerts on student progress. Making it easy to review student’s work and access peer feedback.
Features:
- Engages students in hands-on learning, together
- Teaches engineering concepts in a fun and interactive way
- Develops and documents problem-solving skills
- Promotes creativity and true collaboration
- Makes STEM subjects more accessible for students and educators
- Set-up and clean-up is easy!
- Innovative metrics on student activity empower key learning moments
Curriculum or Lesson Topics:
A proven, powerful educational tool, MindLabs helps students develop their problem-solving skills through interactive challenges and open-ended engineering design projects and help defeat the evil Dr. Stonebreaker. Students document their work, award kudos to classmates and share emotions with educators through tools directly integrated in the platform.
This lesson series focuses on concepts of energy through circuits. The engineering design process, and specifically the steps of troubleshooting designs in order to make improvements is the focus of the lesson. The storyline follows Atom and Anne, a robot team, trying to fix circuits broken by the villainous Dr. Stonebreaker. Each lesson is approximately 60 minutes long, with flexibility to adapt to shorter or longer sessions.
Each lesson has available a scripted lesson plan and a PDF slide deck.
Lesson 1 Atom’s Energetic Escape Summary:
- Students are introduced to Atom, Anne, Dr. Pixel, and Dr. Stonebreaker; the characters who will teach students about energy and circuits in subsequent lessons. In this lesson, students begin learning about energy, what forms it can take and how it can be stored.
Lesson 2 Energy Transforms Summary:
- Students learn about different forms of energy and how they can transform. Students learn what electricity is and then create a simple circuit using a AA battery and light bulb.
Lesson 3 Circuit Connections Summary:
- Students learn how to troubleshoot and how to apply troubleshooting to open circuits.
Lesson 4 Beware the Short Summary:
- Students learn about short circuits and how to apply troubleshooting to short circuits.
Lesson 5 Design to Save the World Summary:
- Students will create circuits using augmented reality subject to criteria and constraints and learn to follow a defined engineering design process.
What's Included:
Hardware:
- (7) Card Decks each containing:
- 1 Instruction Card
- 6 Orange Idea Cards
- 9 Green Component Cards
- 2 Pink Cards
- 5 Blue Character Cards
Software:
This product includes either a 1, 2, or 3-year license with access to the following:
- LMS Platform that includes the following features:
- Assign and manage student work
- Create and save engineering design projects
- Online Notebook for educator feedback and review
- Synchronous class newsfeed
- Collaborative class discussion and response
- Visibility to student-entered self regulation and emotional control inputs
- Visibility to student-entered collaboration feedback
- Comment on student work
- Professional Development Videos
- Class Slides and Lesson Plans
Additional Notes or Considerations:
How to solve, create and collaborate!
- Open the app, Play as Guest and select Challenge or Create from the menu.
- Find the blue character card in your card deck and point your mobile device at the card.
- Progress through the Challenges to learn circuit and energy basics OR Create your own unique circuits, independently or collaborate with classmates.
- Assemble cards picturing batteries, light bulbs, fans, and more into working circuits with augmented reality
- Draw and connect wires on the screen of a mobile device to bring circuits to life
- Explore energy concepts with animated vocabulary cards
- Step-by-step lessons and slides help educators facilitate with ease
- Review student work on an intuitive web platform
Download the FREE App in the App Store (iPad) or Google Play Store (phone or tablet).
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