Culture Club: Exploring the World

Students will embark on a fun-filled, educational journey to explore the diverse and vibrant cultures from around the world. Each day of the week will focus on a different country or region, allowing students to experience unique customs, traditions, foods, languages, art, music, and celebrations. Through hands-on activities, games, crafts, music, and group discussions, students will gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the world’s cultural richness, all while building global awareness.

Exploring STEAM Careers

In this exciting and dynamic course, gifted 5th-grade students will dive into the world of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) careers, with a particular focus on cutting-edge fields like supercomputing. Through hands-on projects, interactive discussions, and problem-solving activities, students will explore how advanced technologies like supercomputers are used to solve complex challenges in various industries, from healthcare to space exploration. This class will help students understand the diverse career opportunities available in the STEAM fields and how the skills they develop now will shape their future.

Astronomical Arithmetic

We take the basics of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing to a whole new level! In this class, you'll tackle challenging problems that bridge the gap between arithmetic and algebra. With exciting twists like factoring and other algebraic techniques, you'll start to see how these two worlds of math connect. Perfect for students who love a challenge and want to dive deeper into the power of numbers!

Minecraft

One of the most popular computer games, Minecraft at its core is a sandbox game that provides an environment for its players to explore and create. This class will focus on the Education Edition of the game to introduce students to programming to control the in-game abilities of their character, allowing them to make games that involve granting players superpowers.

Monday: Introducing and sampling the different powers that can be granted in Minecraft custom games. These include things like Speed, Invulnerability, and Flight

Tuesday-Wednesday: Having the students work in small teams to build maps and set up the interactions using coding blocks to complete a checklist of effects. 

Thursday-Friday: Play the games, identify fun and unfun parts, and begin tweaking the gameplay.