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Our UMS Robotics Team, UMS Fitnessfix, continues to demonstrate their drive as they prepare for the upcoming FLL Challenge Week which will take place February 22nd to 26th. Members of the team meet twice each week and tasks are assigned for the team members to work on both individually and collaboratively to reach monthly targets.

They are working on an innovation project like every year, but this time their chosen theme is the ‘Importance of Fitness’. The team has decided to create a fitness board game to help motivate youth to exercise. The team has created instructions, designs, and a web-site to go along with the board game. They are currently working on getting the board game completed and finalizing the presentation touches.

An important key aspect to note is that the team members ‘walked the talk’ as they exercised themselves in order to create instructional videos, showcasing a wide variety of the exercises which are a part of the board game, demonstrating the correct and safe format to execute each one of the exercises.

On the robotics side of things, they have been working through missions and are using information from previous years to boost their practice and performance. To practice core values, every week a team member brings in a fun activity to start off the meeting. This way they get to know each other more and learn about each members’ interests, hobbies and their core values.

We congratulate our UMS Fitnessfix team for their perseverance and commitment to share their passion within our school and our local community. We will look forward to hearing all about their experiences at the competition event; stay tuned for updates.

Did you know, in 2014, UMS was one of the first elementary schools in Ontario to bring Coding into the mainstream curriculum? Following an initiative that begun in the United Kingdom, our Design and Technology classes, from Casa through to Grade Eight have been focused on bringing coding to our students. Since then, we have expanded our pro-gram to include visual robotics as part of the ongoing process of ensuring new technology is part of the UMS curriculum. Our Technology classes are comprised of four main units: Digital Citizenship, Software Application, Coding, Robotics, and Engineering. The program strives to promote our students to think ‘outside of the box’ as they develop their skills, while teaching them to understand programming and programming concepts in active ways. Coding requires students to problem solve, work both independently and in collaboration, and show initiative, organization, and responsibility. We are preparing our students with the skills which they will take with them into their future.