CFWT Mini-Grants for Teachers Story: Trinity Christian School

With a mini-grant from the Community Foundation of West Texas, a Trinity Christian School elementary teacher executed her “Computing from the Inside Out” project. This project taught students about engineering, how computer circuits work, problem-solving, and collaboration. After a semester of online learning, students were eager to reconnect and work together.

The teacher further explained the project objective:

“They created marble mazes that accomplished provided objectives. The level of difficulty increased as the students learned eventually leading students to create a 'computer' that solved basic addition and subtraction problems. The project worked as planned. As students progressed through the puzzle, the difficulty increased rapidly. This was a great opportunity to challenge our gifted students, and by pairing them with other students, I was able to keep all of the students excited, engaged, and learning. I was able to pair Turing Tumble activities with coding activities to teach students the concept of conditional statements. This worked better than expected and helped students begin to understand how code makes computers work.”

To help local teachers purchase classroom items outside of their set annual budget, donate to the Community Foundation of West Texas through the link provided. www.cfwtx.org/give-now