Miami Country Day School
Miami Country Day School (MCDS) is a private PreK-12 preparatory school in north Miami, Florida which has partnered with Inspirit AI, an innovative curriculum-based organization led by Stanford and MIT graduates who specialize in artificial intelligence, to create a new course for elementary age students. MCDS, named a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, was uniquely positioned to collaborate with subject matter experts to bring project-based, hands-on coding lessons to their students. As part of their continuing commitment to cultivating innovative approaches to STEAM education, MCDS connected with Inspirit AI to bring modern coding curriculum to their emerging Innovation Lab.
Primed for Innovation
Tracy Haswell, the Director of the the Garner Center for Innovation at MCDS, has previously provided integrated STEAM activities like 3D printers and LEGO Education Mindstorm robotics to their young innovators and expressed enthusiasm for expanding their after school programs with a course in artificial intelligence for kids.
With a dedicated digital classroom set up already in place, the school searched for an opportunity to make full use of its flexible learning spaces. Upon hearing about Inspirit AI’s work making artificial intelligence and coding accessible to elementary age students of all backgrounds, school administration and curriculum developers at Inspirit AI began laying out the groundwork for a new after school program: AI Creators.
Design Thinking Meets Curriculum
Developed by Emmy Li, Inspirit AI’s Head of Instructional Design, and taught by Maddie Bradshaw, Inspirit AI’s Director of Product, AI Creators provides students with the confidence and courage to begin building apps and games despite having no background experience in coding.
Taught on the block-based coding site Scratch, students quickly picked up the basics of snapping multicolored blocks together to move animated characters across their screen. Learning code through blocks allows absolute beginners to train their brains to think algorithmically and understand how computers think in an intuitive and approachable way. Over the course of several months, the block playground becomes a welcome familiarity for young learners as they gain more autonomy to try more elaborate and complex games.
Sticking close to MCDS’ mission to “learn and apply process-oriented practices that are open-ended, child-directed and focus on developing design thinking practices,” Ms. Li says of the curriculum development process:
“Top priority for me was finding fun, interactive, and approachable ways to get students thinking about machine learning in relation to their own learning journey. We brought in music generation, collaborative drawing apps, and old-school video games to allow these young learners the opportunity to see how technology could make everything around them a little more magical.”
A Digital Classroom
Ms. Bradshaw meets fourteen smiling faces over Zoom after school on Mondays and Wednesdays, guiding the fifth graders through building self-driving cars controllable by the wave of a hand and chatbots that can write song lyrics.
Through the twenty sessions, students have coded their own projects inspired by their favorite Minecraft characters, modeled after their friends, and shared to make the world a better place.
Ms. Bradshaw says of her class:
“MCDS students show up to each class, curious and eager to learn. From exploring the intersection of AI and music to coding their own self-driving car projects, MCDS students are building essential 21st century skills – and having fun while learning!”
Exemplified in the mini-projects they complete, students frequently cite games like “Grow-A-Plant” and “Multiplayer Racing” as some of their favorite coding activities Ms. Bradshaw has led them to create.
Integral to the rapid success of AI Creators is the physical classroom set-up at the school. Each student is able to log into Zoom on their own device, listen in on personal headphones, and share screen with the class during collaborative debugging or to show off their latest creation. In addition, MCDS accommodates students with different learning styles or attention needs by projecting Ms. Bradshaw’s face and screen on a large screen for the entire class to follow along. While Ms. Bradshaw teaches the class as a whole virtually, Ms. Haswell is on the ground and able to respond quickly to any quick tech issues and emotional needs of the students in the background. This partnership of classroom management between the two instructors is assisted by a wide camera which allows Ms. Bradshaw to see the entire classroom at once to keep a pulse on the energy levels of this cohort of fidgety fifth graders.
New Endeavors
With their sights set on offering innovative lessons to a broader audience, MCDS is in the planning phase with Inspirit AI to build out a custom course for their middle and high school students to be delivered over the summer and into the next school year. The new course development will be adaptable to teaching and learning during the school day, as many older students have athletic commitments immediately after school.
Nonetheless, this is an exciting time to be a student attending Miami Country Day Schools, as it sharpens its technological offerings and expands the realm of what’s possible for students to learn. It seems the biggest ideas can start from the smallest kids.
