Teachers gain hands-on tech savvy through UW Engineering program

Fifty-two K-12 teachers from as far away as Senegal, including local educators Chad and Lindsay Lindsay and JeriLyn Love, and a dozen high school students from nine states across the country, attended the University of Wyoming Engineering Summer Program for Teachers (ESP4T) July 20-24.

ESP4T is a hands-on workshop that gives teachers the tools to implement physical computing lessons into their curricula, including programming lessons in PictoBlox, C++, Scratch and Python, which were applied to the ever-popular Arduino and Raspberry Pi robotics units MechDogs, TonyBoT, SpiderPi and CoDrone.

The workshop was made possible by Tier-1 funding provided by the UW College of Engineering and Physical Sciences and was orchestrated by Suresh Muknahallipatna, a UW professor of electrical engineering and computer science, with assistance from Annette Camp, an administrative associate in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences. Teaching assistance and technical expertise were furnished by a cadre of graduate and undergraduate assistants and experienced teacher mentors from schools across Wyoming.

New to this year’s curriculum were wheeled robots that were built in-house by the ESP4T team. Workshop participants put these robots through their paces with a round of robot World Cup soccer matches.

Each day, participants met with teacher mentors who have been through the workshop previously and are experienced in implementing lessons from the curricula into their schools. These groups become career-building mentorship groups that provide support long after the workshop ends.

“As someone with little to no background in engineering or computer science, one of the most exciting parts of this training was learning how to use Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Tinkercad for the very first time,” said Argie Castro, a teacher from the Northern Cheyenne Tribal School in Busby, Montana. “I never imagined that I could build circuits, write code and see my projects come to life. Every hands-on activity boosted my confidence and reminded me that it’s never too late to learn new skills that can transform teaching and learning.”

As part of the workshop, participants had access to the full curricula and lesson plans for each of the modules with which they worked, so they will be “out-the-door ready” to introduce concepts in cutting-edge computing to young learners. Lessons also are adaptable to students of many ages.

“The two things that inspired me most were the energy and the creativity that the participants demonstrated in their workshop. Teachers of all ages were actively engaged with the technology, with the pedagogy and with their colleagues,” Kraig Sheetz, UW executive vice president, said. “It truly reinforced the optimism I have for educating our next generation of engineers who will be ready to tackle ill-defined problems in an era of rapidly evolving technology. Hats off to the UW staff and faculty who planned and executed this great event for teachers across Wyoming and the nation.”