The purpose of our L0 Courses is to trigger a lifelong curiosity with technology. Our hope is this will lead to rewarding careers for them in the future. All our Level 0 programs are completely play based. Kids would feel like they are playing with robots, colorful mats, characters, digital animations and enacting in stories. But they will be learning these technology topics passively as well! This course helps them improve their problem-solving skills, pushes their creativity to new heights, and exposes them to STEM. Overall, trigger their love for technology and self-learn of it. Overall, triggering their curiosity to Technology, leading to rewarding Tech careers!
After completing our L0 course, students can gradually continue onto L1, or perhaps L2 for more of a challenge. Please see our methodology page to learn more about our learning methodology from play based learning (L0) at elementary to mastery(L3) by end of high school.
Level 0 – Robotics
The Level 0 curriculum triggers kid’s excitement and curiosity for robots by immersing them to stories that involve real, physical, educational robots. In L0 Robotics classes, we focus on providing fun themed stories to keep students enthusiastic and engaged. That way they there is more of a purpose to programing, building, testing, before finally playing and traverse through mazes, mats, and obstacles with their robots. An example of a fun story: A monster has trapped a rescue robot named Clark, and the kids have to help Clark escape. They do this by programming the robot with a solution to become a Robot Hero and save puppies in danger. Another example of a fun theme: Taking part in a robot dance-off and talent show.
In the Robot Build sessions, students will be given a Snap-On Robotics kit, which has modular electronic pieces that are designed to snap into place together, and an Android Tablet, so they can build their robot and bring it to life. Some examples of builds we have in our L0 course are: Robot Car, Building basic circuits, Engineering Vehicle, Robot monkey, etc.
Once completing the build, the students will be able to control their robot to take part in fun activities such as playing robot soccer, red light green light, freeze tag, and more! Overall, they get to have fun but also passively learn the basics of coding and robotics.
The advantage of physical robotics, over learning traditional STEM on the computer or on paper, is that students get to see their code in action in real time. This gives a better understanding on the effect of coding and gives a greater level of satisfaction than one just in front of a screen.
Level 0 – Coding and Digital Arts
Coding is not just learning to type commands / sets of instructions in a particular language to create solutions, but is instead a more creative tool. We add Sustainable Development goals as learning objectives. By learning to code and Sustainability concepts, students can contribute to shaping the future of technology by creating innovating solutions for a better tomorrow.
For starters, we use visual block coding like Scratch, towards a theme and/or story which allows even young children to build code of their own adventures, etc. With visual coding, students can learn to bring creations to life, and then power them with imaginative storytelling.
By the end of this coding course, students will have gained knowledge in writing long structured code sets in block-based programming (Scratch) and have enhanced their problem-solving skills and creativity. And hopefully, by gaining comfort and confidence through our courses, they will be determined to solve some greater challenges our humanity is facing! To know more about sustainable development goals SDGs visit the united nations website: https://sdgs.un.org/goals
Digital Arts: One of the most innovative courses in STEM! Identify students with creative and imaginative abilities and lead them to a path of using digital tools to express their imagination. In these sessions, we introduce a new digital application every other class and students complete a project with it.
For example, students will perform tasks like creating an animation to bloom a flower, making digital greeting cards, making wall art for decorating their rooms, creating music digitally, designing flyers and posters, and more! We hope that by giving students the chance to explore a variety of fun technological projects, they complete the course with a greater interest in a few applications.
Digital media creation is tending to replace more traditional art creation (painting, paper sketching, etc.). With more and more efficient easy to use digital tools at our fingerprints, students can see why digital creation is taking over compared to more traditional art creation techniques. This course helps start to fill the gap and jump from physical art creation to digital art creation.
OUR METHODOLOGY – OUR LEVEL 0 TO LEVEL 3 APPROACH
- Level 0 (ages 6 to 8) is our Excitement phase where we trigger the students’ interest and curiosity for technology.
- Level 1 (ages 9 to 13) is our Learn phase, where we follow the BC curriculum and go beyond to enhance the students’ understanding of electronics. Build a strong base knowledge on the topic.
- Level 2 is our Experience phase where students do a series of 2-3 month long projects for two years, gaining experience in various aspects in the field. I.e.; Put the learning from Level 1 to test, practice & refine.
- Level 3 is our Expertise phase which is a full one-year team project spanning multiple disciplines and done in partnership with secondary schools. This is an invitation only project.
Kids can choose to do Level 0 more than once and it will remain engaging because we are always using new robotic kits. Also as kids become more comfortable and take a deeper dive into our L0 kits, they can gain an overall better understanding of the robots, and transition into Level 1 better. Note: All other levels (L1/L2) are done only once.
General Notes:
- There will be non-screen (ie; no laptops/tabs etc. to rest their eyes) breaks in during the program and students play games like Jenga & Uno to manage long stay. Please pack some extra snacks if they are staying from school dismissal to 5:30 pm.
- Parents can see lot of pictures and videos of student’s classes in our facebook group (invitation only for parents) to see progression and so parents can ask better questions to their kids.
What is new in 2023-2024?
- PAYMENTS MONTHLY : Total nine(9) payments including the first payment during registration. Since the classes start mid-sept 2023 ish, Sept-Dec 2023 is considered three months.
- To cancel for any reason, there is a two-week notice before the end of the month/term required. (Ex: email us at info@cloverdalerobotics.ca by March 15,2024 to cancel by end of March 2024).
- All students receive a course completion certificate at the end of the course
- We provide progress reports to parents for each term. Parents can also view pictures and videos of classes, videos of activity done by students in our closed Facebook group.
- We are including more robot build activities in the course. There are a lot more of hands on ‘robot build’ than previous year.
- We maintain a student to teacher ratio of 12:1 so all kids can get attention. Teacher Biographies are in our team section.
- 20 spots available. First come first served. Registration is open. Reserve your spots early.
- Exact start dates and class days will be shared later.
CLASS TIME: School Dismissal TO 5:00 PM ON MONDAYS
