This workshop was held on April 25th at Primary school “Sreten Mladenovic Mika”, Nis, Serbia as a part of join activities within NiSTEaM initiative of Scientix Ambassadors from the city of Nis for taking part in SDW 2019. It is an introduction to coding and computer science by way of making and design, using the revolutionary new micro:bit micro controller board, and Microsoft’s easy and powerful MakeCode block-based coding environment. It is a project-based curriculum with a maker philosophy at its core; the idea is that by making physical objects, students create a context for learning the coding and computer science concepts.
We found that existing curriculum for beginners focused mostly on solving math problems or constructing geometric shapes and that there was a certain type of student that signed up for computer science classes and these students were almost always boys. We wondered whether a different approach to teaching the basics of computer programming would be more engaging and also attract a larger variety of different types of students, both boys and girls.
Author Archives: Dalibor Todorovic
THROUGH THE STEM TO THE STARS
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Within STEM Discovery Week 2018, our 7th grade students with their teachers, Dalibor Todorovic and Aleksandar Stojkovic, visited the Laboratory of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Department of Physics at the Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics. Professors Dragan Gajic and Milan Milosevic from this department held great presentations. The students were introduced to instruments for space observation, such as the LKS200 Meade telescope, Lunt solar telescope and Vixen solar telescope. They also learned interesting facts about our galaxy and the galaxy of Andromeda. They were introduced to Skywatcher and through the great photos they discovered the magic of the universe and realised that science and physics are all around us.
In the second part, we visited the laboratories of physics and through interesting lectures and experiments, held by professor Dragan Radivojevic, the students discovered the importance of physics. They were introduced to exercises in mechanics (acceleration of gravity, harmonic pendulum, physical and mathematical pendulum, determining resonance, determining the speed of sound), Thermodynamics (measurement of DHL-viscosity coefficient, determination of surface tension of liquids, measurement of the specific heat of water by flow calorimeter), optics, electrical engineering (Ohm’s law), measurement of radioactivity using Geiger-Miller’s counter.
Read more about the event here.