UC Davis Hosts C-STEM Day
Students from elementary school through community college will take part in the sixth annual C-STEM Day held by the University of California, Davis on May 21. The C-STEM Day
events will take place at the UC Davis campus and at University High School in Irvine, CA.
Participating students have spent the last year working with computing, robotics and math curricula developed by the UC Davis Center for Integrated Computing and STEM Education (C-STEM Center). C-STEM Day is the culminating event, where students
can demonstrate the math and programming skills they have learned
throughout the year. As part of C-STEM Day, students compete in the
RoboPlay Challenge Competition and RoboPlay Video Competition. The
event concludes with the C-STEM Day Awards Ceremony, with the
presentation of awards for achievement, excellence, girl's leadership
and the C-STEM scholarship.
The RoboPlay Challenge is a
competition with teams of three to five students. On the day of the
event, the teams are presented with a problem to solve and they must
use their math and programming skills to program a robot to solve the
problem. Teams can win first, second and third place awards, as well as
awards for spirit, teamwork and perseverance.
The RoboPlay Video
Competition is a presentation of student videos created using robots.
Students write, produce and edit videos of robots in an organized
visual performance. The competition encourages students to use their
artistic and musical talent while they explore the basic concepts of
C-STEM. The competition includes awards for best storyline,
choreography, custom-designed part, overall video, film promoting
computation thinking or most interesting task.
In April, the C-STEM Center released a complete curriculum for grades 1-12 called the C-STEM Math Information and Communication Technologies Pathway (Math-ICT-Pathway). The center also offers C-STEM Studio and RoboBlockly,
both of which are available as free downloads from the center's site.
C-STEM Studio is a platform for hands-on learning of computing,
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (C-STEM) with
robotics, and RoboBlockly is a puzzle-piece programming tools for
working with real and virtual robots.
Further information about the C-STEM curricula and C-STEM Day can be found on the UC Davis site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].