Costa Rica News – A very special teacher represented Costa Rica in a Microsoft contest. She, Susana Salas, taught her 6-year-old students robotics.
The Anglo American School already offered such classes to older students but she designed a curriculum to teach it to preschoolers.
She taught students how the gears of a machine integrate to make it work. The youngsters succeeded in understanding how robots work and even how to assemble them.
The 35-year-old teacher noticed gaps in knowledge among elementary school children and decided to teach the missing skills starting in pre-k. She urges these children to think about how things like the classroom fan work. She also uses slides to show the sequence of how helicopter pieces are assembled.
She uses technical, scientific and mathematical words and the children pick up on them and use them too.
The children progress to building their own cars and more complex robotics.
She represented the country in the international conference for teachers, organized by Microsoft, called Education Exchange. It took place in Canada and had over 300 educators there.
