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Simpson County School District (SCSD) employee Leslie May is now the recipient of a competitive grant awarded by the Mississippi Professional Educators (MPE), a statewide professional organization of teachers, administrators and non-certified staff.
May is one of 43 applicants from across the state selected to receive a classroom grant, up to $40,000, to enhance instructional offerings or educational experiences for students during the 2022-23 school year. May was awarded $854 to fund her project entitled “Robotics – Build, Code and Bring to Life,” which will provide third- and fourth-grade gifted students in the Fostering Learning to Attain Goals (FLAG) program an opportunity to build, code and bring a robot to life.
May said she got the idea to do a robotics project from her students, although she was hesitant at first
“I got the idea actually from my students because they wanted to do it, but I was scared to do it,” said May. “At the end of the year, I always ask them what they like best about FLAG and what they would like to do different, and all of them wanted to do robots.”
Determined to get the MPE grant, May conducted extensive research on how robotics develops skills, such as cognitive and mathematical, and how it also provides students with skills that can be transferred to other areas of learning. May noted that this project aligns with the district’s Portrait of a Graduate, an initiative that aims to ensure students achieve certain competencies before they graduate from SCSD.
Magee Elementary School Principal, Dr. Paul Lawrence, said that he is excited about the opportunities the robotics project will provide for the FLAG students.
“The robotics project will allow opportunities in the area of critical thinking and problem solving,” said Lawrence. “The robotics projects will present unique challenges, allowing students to break down issues, ask questions and reason in areas they may not have had experiences in before. I am excited that these new opportunities are going to exist.”
For the project, the students will learn the basics of robotics through teacher instruction, PowerPoints, videos, and research and will build robots using learning kits. So far, May and her students have built “brush bots” – battery-powered scrub brushes – to learn the various parts of a robot as they prepare to build more advanced ones.
“We’ve had the most fun with the brush bots. We’ve had races with them, and we’ve changed things up on them,” she said. “The students’ engagement is amazing to me. I didn’t know they could do some of this stuff.
A resident of Magee, May teaches FLAG to students in second through fourth grade at Magee Elementary School. She has been a member of MPE since 2012.
About Mississippi Professional Educators
Founded in 1979, MPE is a statewide professional association with approximately 13,500 teachers, administrators and non-certified staff from kindergarten to graduate school level. Our top priority is the education and achievement of students. MPE awards up to $40,000 in classroom grants to MPE members who wish to enhance instructional offerings or educational experiences for their students. For more information on MPE’s classroom grant program and other benefits, please visit www.mpe.org.
MageeNews.com is an online news source covering Simpson and surrounding counties as well as the State of Mississippi.
