The 2022-2023 World Cultures team was recognized by Humble ISD at convocation on Wednesday, August 2, 2023. Ms. Davida Vasser-Allen, Ms. Tabitha Chase and Ms. Jessica Holcomb received their “Shine the Light” award for their innovative project from the prior year in which students utilized robotics to demonstrate their learning of North American geography.
According to Mr. Lofton, the team utilized the library to recreate geography in North America. Students were then tasked with creating a travel itinerary of cities and landmarks that they wanted to visit. Using coding and sphero robots to map their travels, the students utilized their knowledge of North America to travel around North America while calculating the distance of their travels.
The activity was built in coordination with WMS’s former Media Specialist, Misty Oliver.
Ms. Oliver said, “this activity actually started out as my leadership project for my second year in Humble ISD’s digital design and innovation’s ASPIRE group and I presented our findings and activities to district stakeholders at the end of the year. Planning the lessons were fun, daunting, scary at times but ultimately incredible to try out new teaching tools and integrate technology into everyday lessons. Also I loved getting to work with such awesome teachers. Ms. Holcomb and Ms. Vasser-Allen even came to my house last December break to spend about 4 hours planning the project!”
The World Cultures team took on a new approach last year in presenting their curriculum to their 6th grade students, placing a larger focus on technology in the classroom. In this project, the World Cultures team utilized the library to recreate North American geography. Students then created their own travel itinerary of places they wanted to visit and coded sphero robots to not only travel to these locations but also to calculate the distance from place to place.
“When planning this activity we wanted to do something that would challenge the students, provide multimodal learning experiences and relevant instruction to support 21st century learners,” said Ms. Vasser-Allen. “We looked at the curriculum and assignment from previous years, and decided to have the students use Sphero robots to allow Social Studies to come alive by flipping the library to support student learning, engagement to apply their learning to the real world and meaningful content. Our inspiration comes from our desire to (Re)Imagine Social Studies to meet the needs of all students.”
The recognition for this project took place at Humble ISD’s annual convocation surrounded by faculty and staff from every Humble ISD middle and high school.
“[The recognition at convocation] was a complete and total surprise. While I was excited and proud about the work our team had done I was not expecting the recognition at all!! However, it reminded me of my why and gave me that spark I needed to dig deeper to build on this experience and make it even better.”
This year, the World Cultures team is being joined by Mr. Christopher Johnson, and they plan to continue their focus on technology in the classroom.
Ms. Vasser-Allen said, “We are going to revisit the activity , but add a new flare to it by using the theme-parks to show our knowledge of content and technology to support POG and t21st Century learning.”