Woodlands Christian Academy lab focuses on tech and innovation skills

The Woodlands Christian Academy STEAM lab has a simple, overarching goal: teach kids the skills they need through technology and innovation so they can independently solve problems. So far, with one semester in the bag, the lab has seen great success.

Tanya Sharron is the STEAM lab teacher and the motivating factor of its creation. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, arts, math.

As a first-grade teacher at the Academy, Sharron saw how innovative her students were and she wanted to give them a space that would help them reach their full potential.

In January, she went to an Apple Academy conference and began to think about what creativity looked like at her school. She presented the idea of the lab to the school’s administration and found the support she needed to get it started.

Since launching in August of 2019, the lab has been integrated into the kindergarten through fourth-grade classes. This semester they have been working on creating mazes, first with paper then by using Scratch computer coding program.

The students created backstories to their mazes and brought their creations to their classmates to test out their coding. Now the mazes are finished and the students will be working on creating videos about their mazes to show off their work. Next semester, the students will compete in teams to complete the mazes during the Amazing Maze Challenge.

As an Apple Distinguished School, the class is designed to teach the students the Apple platforms on the company’s curriculum using the International Society for Technology in Education standards.

“We’re getting exposure to all of that because we want all of this learning to connect to outside in the community,” Sharron said. “We…