Educators

One thing is for sure - ‘The New Normal’ is not just talking about teaching through the screen, it’s about how to use the computer as a tool for learning. We make the learning tools to compliment using the screen with coding, creativity, and innovation!

Our mission is to help educators embrace creative learning -- to achieve this mission, we created Strawbees Learning for you, teachers and educators globally. We base this platform from the approach of learning in kindergarten through Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and Imagine -- using the educational pedagogy the Creative Learning Spiral from MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten group. With the expanding library of support resources such as ‘How to use Strawbees in your Classroom,’ lesson plans, activities, and explorations you and your students can increasingly engage in complex projects as your understanding of how creative learning grows.

The building system of Strawbees through the connectors, straws, electronic hardware, and code make it easier to ignite your students’ creativity with the intuitive building system of color-coded building pieces for creating any project we publish or even for building from imagination.

The process of building with Strawbees revolves around Invention Literacy, a term coined by Jay Silver describes this as, “Invention literacy is the ability to read and write human made stuff, from toasters to apps.” Inventors don’t perform magic. Understanding the world around us means being able to deconstruct it as building blocks of inventing. Viewing the building blocks such as vocabulary, grammar, spelling and sounds help us understand what we read to make sense when we write and create with our hands. When familiar with these basic building blocks, such as mechanisms, movement, construction, design, electronics, programming and anything relevant to the project idea we want to create - then we can interchange these blocks together in innovative ways to make something new!

When students are creating a structure from the STEAM School kit, adding a servo motor, lights and touch sensing with a program to control the motion of a mechanism from the Coding and Robotics with Quirkbot School kit the inventing process already started. Strawbees offers you a great tool to coach students not just what buttons to push or what the correct sequence is to move a robot across the room, but much more. “Learning by doing isn’t good enough. Learning by trying is the future,” as mentioned by Erik Thorstensson. It encourages each and every student to take ownership of their learning by trying. As a result students grow to understand that it is okay to fail and gain confidence in finding creative solutions. Imagine a classroom full of completely different robot solutions to the same challenge!

We put together some interesting resources on this Educator page including projects shared by other teachers, Robot racer sketches drawn by students, and teacher testimonials who already are using Strawbees.

 We look forward to working with you! Let us know what else you need, we’re always happy to help!