Today our Programming Studio Class class was visited by Mukesh Kumar, a parent and community member who designs integrated circuits. As we teach students coding skills, it is important for them gain a basic understanding of the hardware that is engineered to work with the instructions or code they are learning to write. Our guest speaker explained some concepts involving circuit design and showed a complex diagram for an integrated circuit that was created to regulate power flow for cell phone and other device chargers.  Students were able to make connections between our class learning and the real world work of designing integrated circuits and the programming that work together to make our modern electronics function. 

Two of our recent Innovation Lab projects focused on video. First graders from Ms. Mackenzie's class read their animals in winter reports in front of the green screen and we were able to use their own drawings which were created in KidPix as the background. Mrs. Lee's fourth grade class used KidPix as well, but recorded their own narration with the laptop camera. Both projects demonstrate the power of technology in student creative expression. Check out both videos below.