Innovation Hour

The innovation hour event was held at Gordon Terrace Elementary School, where the teacher candidates, instructor for the class EDCI 336, and the head of the Design Lab of SD5 hosted this event. There were three time slots for specific grades that had around an hour to go through the five stations. The groups that were first to come were the grade 5/6’s, then we had a break when the students were at recess, then it was the grades 4/5 and 2/3’s, and then the last group to come after lunch was the Kindergartens and grade ones. There were five stations that were button making for station one, station two was robotic Rubik’s cubes, station three was Microbits, station four was Chomp Saws, and the last station was unplugged.

The stations I got to do were Station five for the grades 5/6, station three for the grades 5/4 and 2/3, and station one for the kindergarten grade 1 group.

The first hour, I got to do the Unplug station that had a lot of kinks in it that we had to overcome and change as we went on with every group we had. For this station, we had the students go to 3 different stations, and we put the students in groups of three so there was a student at each spot. The first spot was where the student would choose from three different pictures to draw using simple shapes to create their simple picture. The picture that they were choosing from was a cat, a car, and a house, and they had to use shapes like a circle, a square, and a triangle. The second part of this station was taking the picture and trying to figure out what shapes are within the picture, and choosing 2-3 shapes to hand off to the last station for this activity. The last activity was trying to figure out, with the shapes, what picture was chosen, and to decipher the code.

The next grades I got to work with were the grades 4,5,3,2, where I was at station 3, the microbit watches. For this station, we had coded watches where there was some use of AI, so the answer wouldn’t always be accurate. Students had to do specific moves and actions to figure out what picture that showed up on the screen meant. Students were in groups of two, trying to figure out what each picture meant and what actions were involved for them to show up. During this station, students were able to get out of their comfort zone and be silly and active to figure out the specific movements to fill out on their chart.

For the last station, I was working on station one, which involved button making, and I got to work with the kindergartners and grade ones. At this station, the students were able to express their ideas in creating their own buttons that they could wear. While being at this station, I got to work with the machine and make the students their buttons after they drew on their paper.