NW Saturday Academy
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Anonymous
| I'm thinking of signing up my rising 4th grader for the robotics team through the NW Saturday Academy. Anyone have experience with them? Was it good? |
Anonymous
No personal experience, but another parent at my kid's school had their kid there and had good things to say. |
Anonymous
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What grade does it go up through
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Anonymous
3rd, 4th, and 5th grade |
Anonymous
| I was not impressed with it enough to return, but some like it. |
Anonymous
What made you unimpressed by it? |
Anonymous
that it didn't impress me |
Anonymous
Thanks for the helpful details. |
Anonymous
That wasn't actually me. I just thought it was very by the book, not a ton of creativity. And they separated the kids by gender. |
Anonymous
| What is the point of this? Is it for kids that are accelerated? What happens when they end up back in their mediocre DCPS without gifted programming? Or is the point to just get kids to grade level? |
Anonymous
I was not impressed by their program, but the point is to teach kids stem and teamwork. It's not about being gifted. Nor should it be. |
Anonymous
| Nothing but good things to say about it. The robotics and programming semesters are great for children in 3, 4, and 5th grade. If your child loves mine craft they will enjoy the programming which provides a foundation and in depth education in creating their own program and presenting it to the team at the end of the semester. |
calexander
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It is interesting that I spent one day away from the computer and this topic came up! I am the founder of this program and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have, on or offline. Feel free to PM me. Christopher |
calexander
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Thanks for the feedback. Our goal is to get better every semester. The robotics (FIRST LEGO League) is an interesting beast. The kit looks like a toy, but when you apply the product to specific academic goals like FLL does, it gets EXTREMELY deep very quickly. For this age group and experience level, we thought that we gave the students too much "freedom to be creative" in the beginning and they were more productive when we pulled in the reigns a little and gave them more targeted tasks. We will continue to evaluate this process. As to gender, we happened to have a group of very quiet and shy girls, so we put them together so they could feel free speak up, express their ideas, preferences, etc. This group was by far the best at completing all of the team-building types tasks. The older and more assertive girls were in a mixed group. |
calexander
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The point is to introduce STEM topics to young children so that it will spark an interest that they might explore later in their academic careers. The FLL missions serve a wide range of ability levels. Some missions can be done by the typical fourth grader while there are others that the typical eighth grader would have no chance in hell of successfully completing. There were 361 teams registered in the state of Maryland this past year and not a single one of them completed the "hard" mission at the state tournament at UMBC. The important note is that this is a global competition that serves kids up to age 14; if you think your elementary kid is really accelerated, this would be a good opportunity for her to show it. Most of the teams that actually advance from the state tournament to the nationals are composed of late middle school students who have experienced FLL for multiple years. Here is a link to learn more about the curriculum for FLL for the upcoming year. |