Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 567 | WWW.CAPSS.ORG RECOMMENDATIONS IN ACTION: A Middle School Scenario ily Takai is fascinated by robots. “When I visit my family in Japan I’m amazed at what robots can do. There was even one at my Obaasan’s hospital!” When she was 9, her family flew to Japan because her grandmother got very sick. Obaasan Aiko was in a nursing home that pioneered the use of therapeutic robots – in this case, PARO, a robot that looks and acts like a baby seal. “When I patted PARO he wriggled around, just like a real animal!” When they returned home to Connecticut, Lily learned everything she could about robots and built toy robots from kits. Now that she’s in middle school, Lily was thrilled to join the robotics club. The after-school robotics club meets at the tech incubator run jointly by the town and the school district. The incubator’s mission is to foster STEM careers and STEM education. It provides workspace and mentoring for start-up companies and hands-on learning opportunities for district students. One of the opportunities is the robotics club, which fields middle school and high school teams for the national FIRST Robotics competitions. Employees from a robotics company coach the teams. FIRST Robotics competitions focus on real-world scientific challenges. In 2015, students in the middle grades were participating in the FIRST LEGO League’s Trash Trek. During the year-long competition, the team builds robots to compete in regional and national trials of the Trash Trek game. Teams earn points for building robots of recyclable parts, programming the robots to move trash (represented by LEGO pieces) through processes to recycle, landfill, or compost used materials. Although the robotics team takes place outside of school, Lily is earning credit for computer science, engineering, problem- solving (a graduation competency,) as well as environmental science. In addition, Lily and her homeroom teacher are weaving her interest in robotics across the curriculum to accelerate Lily’s mastery of the targets in her personalized learning plan. While Lily is an advanced student in math and science, she struggles with reading comprehension. Knowing Lily’s interest in science, Ms. Farley suggested Lily pull together a variety of materials to extend her knowledge of robotics and Three scenarios are interspersed throughout this report. The purpose of the scenarios is to provide an image of what might be possible in a transformed school. There is no one formula for transforming education. Each school or school district will develop its’ own roadmap to transformation. These scenarios are but one possibility. The scenarios are based on interviews with Connecticut staff and students. The vision of these staff and students about what learning could be in a transformed school forms the substance of the scenarios. The individual and school names are fictitious in order to protect the privacy of those interviewed.