News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Baxter Primary School will add robots to its team thanks to a TVA STEM grant.
Baxter Primary Assistant Principal Lacy Loggins said schools could apply for up to $5,000. Loggins said the bee robots will help kids learn coding.
“We know that coding is really big for the future and just a lot of careers that have certain elements of coding in those job opportunities,” Loggins said. “So this is just a neat opportunity to get our littles exposed to coding and how it works.”
Loggins said the robots can be programmed to move and the goal will be to have students program the robot to move between different starting and ending points. Loggins said the school chose to purchase the robots to help kids with career development.
“With our age group we do not have an actual STEM class that students can do on a daily basis,” Loggins said. “So with that, we needed to try to find any and all opportunities that we can embed STEM throughout the day or throughout the week.”
Loggins said being able to provide STEM opportunities to students is more important now than ever. Loggins said the school is actively trying to find ways to implement STEM outside of the curriculum.
“The way in which we do that is when students go to encore class every day we try to find some activities that relate to STEM that they can do during encore to kind of get that exposure to those different career domains.”
Loggins said the school will officially receive the grant funding at the end of December. Loggins said the school hopes to have the robots available by the end of January. Loggins said she believes the kids will enjoy the robots.
“I think it’s really neat that this actual robot is a bee and that is our school mascot,” Loggins said. “So I feel like its neat kind of getting to play with a robot but just its a simple fact that its a honeybee and that’s what we are all about here at Baxter and I think that just makes it a fun learning opportunity.”
