Thursday, September 18, 2014

Hummingbird Robotics Kits: An Instructional Resource With Great Potential!

PRESS RELEASE: BirdBrain Technologies’ Hummingbird Robotics Kit Wins a Learning® Magazine 2015 Teachers’ ChoiceSM Award for the Classroom

Panel of classroom teachers chose electronics kit based on its quality, instructional value, ease of use and innovation

Pittsburgh, PA, September 15, 2014 BirdBrain Technologies’ Hummingbird Robotics Kit was named a winner of Learning® Magazine’s 2015 Teachers’ ChoiceSM Award for the Classroom, one of the most recognized and prestigious awards in the educational market. The electronics kit was chosen by a panel of teachers from across the country as one of only 37 winners based on its quality, instructional value, ease of use, and innovation.

“The Hummingbird Robotics Kit provides students of all ages with an engaging, hands-on way to learn about key STEM concepts, from robotics to programming to electronics, and more,” said Tom Lauwers, founder of BirdBrain Technologies and co-creator of the Hummingbird Robotics Kit. “This award further reinforces the impact our kits have in the classroom and is a particularly great honor since we were evaluated and chosen by actual classroom teachers.” 

 

The Hummingbird Robotics Kit is a spin-off product of Carnegie Mellon's CREATE lab. The kit is designed to introduce engineering and robotics activities to upper elementary students, while at the same time providing more complex robotics design opportunities to older students, through an innovative, arts and crafts-based approach. Students use the kit to make robots, kinetic sculptures, and animatronics built out of a combination of kit parts and crafting materials. Students can use the kits with intuitive software programs such as Scratch, Snap!, and the CREATE Lab Visual Programmer – or more advanced programming such as PythonJava, and Processing – to bring the construction materials to life.

 

“The Hummingbird Robotics Kit enables endless ways to integrate STEM innovations through creativity and inventiveness,” said Stephanie Cotsifas, STEM learning specialist at Institute on Teaching through Technology and Innovation Practice (ITTIP), who uses the kits with her students. “The age range and project ideas are endless with the different ways you can program the microcontroller. It is a great way to get students creating and designing.”

 

Building off the success of the Hummingbird Robotics Kit, BirdBrain Technologies will be launching the Hummingbird Duo later this year. This second-generation kit will include the addition of tether-less operation, Arduino mode, and more.

To learn more about the Hummingbird Robotics Kit, visit http://www.hummingbirdkit.com/.

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