Health & Fitness
A Vision of Quest Academy's Innovation Lab
Discussion about the Innovation Lab coming to Quest Academy.
During both of the State of the School presentations, Thursday, February 7th and Friday, February 8th, I shared one vision of what the Innovation Lab may look like. This is based upon a pop-up maker space which was open for two weeks in New York.
One of the principles, Jaymes Dec, has opened a space similar to what we are proposing at Marymount School in New York. Additionally a number of other independent schools have begun creating these types of spaces, including the Flint Hill School (Oakton, VA), MICDS (St. Louis, MO), Caitlin Gabel (Portland, OR), and Lakeview Academy (Gainsville, GA).
This video will provide a glimpse of what can be possible and what some of the elements that we are proposing to include in the transformation of the current computer lab space into the Innovation Lab.
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Here are some of the elements we are hoping to incorporate in Quest’s Innovation Lab which you can look for in the video:
- In many scenes, you will see a 3d printer, the Makerbots. They will be making rocket nose cones and other objects to open the video.
- The students are using Scratch. Our lower school students currently learn Scratch beginning in the fourth grade. You will see the orange cat. In the middle school this year, we introduced an add-on to Scratch which allows for the additional topics to be used. The framework of the curriculum we used was modified from Cal-Berkeley’s entry-level computer science course. We intend to use these environments for teaching programming.
- The joysticks to control the Scratch program and the student who was getting the LED to blink was done using Arduino microcontrollers and solderless breadboards. Our intention is to incorporate these tools into the Technology course. Additionally, for my teacher raffle offering, I will work with a group of Quest students teaching them how to program either an Arduino Lily Pad (example projects - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4a89n4ZJ5w) or Arduino Due Controllers.
by Vinnie Vrotny, Director of Academic Tecnology
