With the SpinWheel, we have created a device that is perfect for hands-on learning to supplement traditional classroom lessons. Our educational materials will include sample lesson plans for short demos that teachers can integrate into their existing lessons, longer activities that allow students to use the SpinWheel to explore scientific phenomoma without a computer, and longer activities to teach programming using the SpinWheel. We elaborate on some of these ideas below.
If you have access to computers for each student or for groups of students, the SpinWheel adventures provided with the device’s educational materials will enable your students to gain experience coding.
We hope this will empower those without technical backgrounds, whether parents, Girl Scout troop leaders, or other volunteers, to introduce coding to their children.
The SpinWheel can be used for an hour long introductory lesson to simply expose students to programming thinking, or many lessons as part of a longer module to allow students to gain confidence with programming through the Arduino platform. With a classroom kit, we will provide supplemental materials to enable you to lead these lessons whether or not you, as the instructor, have programmed before. Further, we are happy to work with educators to expand on the provided lessons to tailor the experience to the curriculum you are seeking to cover. Feel free to contact us if this is of interest.
The SpinWheel also provides opportunities to explore scientific phenomena, such as gravity and optics, without a computer. The SpinWheel comes with a few pre-loaded programs that do not require a computer to run, and the educational materials provided with the kit will walk you through key scientific concepts that can be experimented with or demonstrated by the pre-loaded SpinWheel programs.
For example, one of the adventures in our educational materials will take students through learning to program the SpinWheel to become a compass. If you have computer access, your students can dive into the programming portion of the activity. In addition to the programming activity, we will also include supplemental lessons and activities for exploring magnetism using both a physical compass (of the type students are probably more comfortable with - a physical compass is not included in the kit) and using pre-loaded programs on the SpinWheel.
Alternatively, the SpinWheel can be used to demo various scientific phenomena, whether in classroom setting or beyond. We can provide self-contained computer software (if necessary, preinstalled on cheap hardware or as an Android app) for a large set of possible demos. For instance, the SpinWheel can be used as a magnetic field sensor, while the attached computer or smartphone shows detailed information about the measurements and presents them in a more scientific fashion. This could be used to teach basic science about magnetism or introduce the engineering that enabled a functioning compass in each of our cell phones.
