ITEC Conference Extra Credit

I chose to go to the ITEC Convention on the UNI campus as a means of extra credit, but instead I found myself astonished with what I saw. There were hundreds of middle-high school students showing off their technology projects at the UNI Commons Thursday, April 19. The first station I stopped at was a Garage Band project done by two young. I have to say, as someone who has attempted to work with Garage Band myself I was really impressed with the level of creativity of their song. When asked how long it took they both smiled and laughed. At first they both had started on completely different projects, but one lost all his material, and for some reason the other partner wasn't able to finish his first one. So, instead of continuing on their first path they decided to team up and start over. There were several sounds mixed, but what impressed me the most was how cohesive their song was. It all made sense! Their song was very impressive, and sounded fantastic!!

While I talked to around five groups of students, I must say that the last young man I talked to impressed me the most. He and his partner created a robotics project. I wasn't able to get a lot of questions answer by the creator because he was very timid, but I did manage to get a video of their project. They had a car made out of Legos, which was computerized so it was able to follow a path into a garage made from Legos. I wonder the time it took to create a project like this. I also wonder how it was even done. I wish that I could have gotten more questions answered while I was there, but I think that the video below shows how awesome this really was! It's very impressive, and mind boggling that two elementary students were able to create such an impressive project!

VIDEO0007 a video by ChasePiper on Flickr.

It just amazes me that students so young can accomplish so much. I wish I could have stayed at the convention longer, but I had to go to class. This is definitely something I would like to attend again in the future. Seeing students work on projects like this really excites me as an aspiring teacher! Education is changing, and I can't wait to see what my students will be able to teach me someday!