In February five educators from the Middlesboro School System attended the SEEC Conference, (Science Exploration Educators Conference) in Houston, TX.  These educators were invited by astronaut John Shoffner and The Perseid Foundation for their unwavering dedication to nurturing the next generation of innovators. They included Charlie Thomas, Middlesboro Elementary STEAM Teacher; Amanda Estes, MMS Science Teacher; Michael Wilson, MMS Social Studies Teacher; Nick Shoffner, MHS Algebra Teacher and Jennifer Lewis, MHS Engineering Teacher.

These five teachers returned to their classrooms with strategies of engagement and cross-curricular project ideas to tie STEM activities into their individual content areas.  Together they crafted a cross-curricular and multi-grade level project.

Each class was charged with a task of creating 3-4 holes of an 18 hole miniature golf course. Classes took efforts to design their holes to represent content they had been learning about  from each of the five curriculums.

All 18 holes were gathered and laid out in Mrs. Lewis’s classroom to form a model of an 18 hole miniature golf course.  Mrs. Lewis’s Engineering students worked with the middle and elementary students to then use block coding to program spheros to navigate through each hole.

Spheros are small round robots that can be programmed to move in any direction. For the project, the students determined the direction and speed to program into their robot. They kept score just like in miniature golf to see how many “strokes” it took to complete each hole.