My colleague, Matt McCullough, posted a great resource on his blog about using fidget spinners educationally. As the spin of this school year winds down, I wanted to share one more lesson idea related to fidget spinners.
If you’re lucky enough to own some littleBits, here is a fun activity for your students: instructions to build a littleBits fidget spinner!
This year I had the opportunity to work with Dayna Cantu, Anthony DeRosa, and Delton Kellogg Middle School students in a makeshift makerspace. Basically, it was an unused classroom with some flexible seating, some cardboard boxes, and lots of old textbooks. We have cranked out some awesome stuff in there this year, including social studies and ELA digital storytelling. Some examples are coding Ollie to represent an immigration journey, adapting fairy tales and Tuck Everlasting to be told through Dash the Robot’s perspective, complete with cardboard settings, and storytelling with Bloxels.
Our littleBits fidget spinner was one of my favorites because the girls had to adapt the directions to work with the kit that Mrs. Cantu owned. They had to replace the input and output bits with others in the existing kit. I was proud of them for problem solving. Their spinner was constructed from cardboard. Then, they went into the hallway and created a whole video of the creation, which totally appealed to my current obsession with CrossBraining (in fact, Mr. DeRosa’s kids actually used GoPros during their littleBits lesson, which was a mechanical arm that threw ping-pong balls at each other).
To check out more fun ideas from Delton Kellogg, follow @lbatsie8, @avd111, @mrscantu5, or #dkschools.
If you’re lucky enough to own some littleBits, here is a fun activity for your students: instructions to build a littleBits fidget spinner!
This year I had the opportunity to work with Dayna Cantu, Anthony DeRosa, and Delton Kellogg Middle School students in a makeshift makerspace. Basically, it was an unused classroom with some flexible seating, some cardboard boxes, and lots of old textbooks. We have cranked out some awesome stuff in there this year, including social studies and ELA digital storytelling. Some examples are coding Ollie to represent an immigration journey, adapting fairy tales and Tuck Everlasting to be told through Dash the Robot’s perspective, complete with cardboard settings, and storytelling with Bloxels.
Our littleBits fidget spinner was one of my favorites because the girls had to adapt the directions to work with the kit that Mrs. Cantu owned. They had to replace the input and output bits with others in the existing kit. I was proud of them for problem solving. Their spinner was constructed from cardboard. Then, they went into the hallway and created a whole video of the creation, which totally appealed to my current obsession with CrossBraining (in fact, Mr. DeRosa’s kids actually used GoPros during their littleBits lesson, which was a mechanical arm that threw ping-pong balls at each other).
To check out more fun ideas from Delton Kellogg, follow @lbatsie8, @avd111, @mrscantu5, or #dkschools.