NV Energy & NTEF Provide Ozobots for Title 1 School's STEM Education

LAS VEGAS - Sept. 4, 2018 - PRLog -- The National Toxic Encephalopathy Foundation (NTEF) selected Whitney Elementary School to be the recipient of a $15,000 grant provided by the NV Energy Foundation to promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education.

The grant from the NV Energy Foundation was used to purchase 225 Ozobots. The OzoBot's Learning System is rooted in De-Constructivism – the concept that people learn best by curious exploration of real world examples. In essence, Evo Bot offers learning by "taking apart" or "deconstructing" examples presented in a meaningful context.

The primary goal of this program is to develop students' basic robotics and coding literacy through the Ozobot program, and therefore gain key 21^st Century skills to unlock future academic and career opportunities. The 21st-century skills they will develop include collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving.

"On behalf of the children and teachers at Whitney Elementary School, we can not thank the NTEF and NV Energy for bringing Ozobots to our school. By doing so they are bringing a fun way for children to learn while being engaged and playing. These Ozobots will provide our students the opportunity to work on projects that foster the ability to analyze, reason, and communicate, as well as, pose, formulate, solve, and interpret solutions. We are greatly appreciative for the opportunities these Ozobots will bring to our students that they may otherwise not have."  -Sherrie Gahn, Principal, Whitney Elementary School

The curriculum was designed to support Next Generation Science Standards and can also be used to integrate learning across subject areas to encourage a deeper level of inquiry and understanding.

According to GirlsWhoCode.org, "The gender gap in computer sciences is getting worse and only 24 percent of computer scientists are women today. These jobs are among the fastest growing in the country" and that's why "the NTEF is a staunch supporter of science education. With the proper introduction at a young age, students will be more inclined to pursue this later in their educational endeavors." –Angel De Fazio, BSAT, President, NTEF

The Evo Bot is a small but powerful robot that is programmable using simple markers or block based computer programming. Teachers can use them in teams, collaborating to create a code to get their robot to achieve missions that increase the challenge to program more complex tasks.

Students will begin by hands-on exploration of robots performing real world applications built with the same programming tools with which they will be working. Next, students will be introduced to the intuitive, block-based coding foundation behind the robotic commands. Students will be challenged to deconstruct and rebuild the code to improve the robots' functionality. As students advance, they will progress to leveraging more complex concepts like variables, functions, loops, logic and conditional statements. Students will also be empowered to create new applications that fully leverage Evo Bot optical and proximity sensors to react to its environment.

"We hope that our community will support our continuing endeavor to get more of these OzoBots into more high-risk Title 1 Elementary Schools." –said De Fazio

To support this program, donations can be made at:
https://www.national-toxic-encephalopathy-foundation.org/...