The bell has just rung at Sheridan Park Elementary, and while most of the children are heading home, two dozen of them stay after school for practice. Not music or sports, we're talking about Lego robotics practice.
"What I tell the boys and girls when they're programming the robot, it can only do what the programmer tells it to do," said Victor Yuen, the teacher who started the Lego robotics team nine years ago.
The program has gone viral, from ten kids to 42 involved now. It's a good illustration of why a school's letter grade, in this case a "C", doesn't tell the whole story.
"We're transforming education inside of our building," said Heather Gonzalez, a teacher at the Hollywood school who wrote the essay entered into the "Brag About Your School" initiative at NBC 6. "Because we're engaging the students, we're getting them to think more creatively, more critically."
Lego robotics emphasizes robot design and performance, but also requires competing teams to research a common topic and present ideas on the subject. This year's topic is re-inventing education.
"If they had a way to change learning in schools, how would they do it?" explains Coach Yuen.
He says Lego robotics teaches computer programming, teamwork, research skills, and the engineering skills necessary to build the robots out of Lego pieces.
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"You and I, when we were younger, we might not have been exposed to these fields when we were kids; but we're starting them early so it opens their eyes and opens doors for them later down the road," said Yuen.
Sheridan Park also has an innovative gardening program, seeded with grant money from Lowe's, which also paid for an outdoor classroom area. The school calls it a growing public-private partnership. It starts with the Head Start children, who are 4 years old.
"The kids didn't know that the fruits and vegetables they picked up in Publix, where they came from; now they can see it," said Principal Maria Tracy.
From digging-in-the-earth science to computer science, they're learning, doing, and moving forward at Sheridan Park Elementary.
