Bill Moseley, Ph.D.
Leadership & Innovation in Education and Technology

This activity is one of the major activities of the week-long camp. In it, students are required to use Lego Mindstorms robotics kits to create an autonomous vehicle that is capable of solving a specific challenge. They are required to construct the vehicle, and then write the program that will allow it to succesfully complete the challenge. In many cases, this challenge is undertaken by students who have very little prior experience with programming and building. This activity stretches them from both intellectual and technological standpoints, but it also serves as a valuable introduction to the ideas that support action research, collaboration and reflection.

This activity uses cooking and food preparation as a context setting activity for students to repfect and share their own learning experiences related to learning to cook. Students are given produce and a knife, and in groups they are instructed to prepare the produce to certain specifications of varying difficulty, while sharing stories with each other of how they learned to cook.

The combination of action, storytelling and sharing helps students to examine learning that occurs largely in a very natural setting. By observing and discussing these ideas, students begin to open their eyes to ideas about teaching and learning that extend beyond the typical methods found in school and corporate learning scenarios.