You may remember that in November of 2014 Quality Stone Concepts in conjunction with the Virginia Beach Education Foundation underwrote a grant at the TGIF Grant Celebration.  It was called Project Redbot and the funding was directed toward 5th graders.  They were tasked to “create a proposal for an autonomous robot which performs a service.”  Students had to include a working prototype to share at the RedBot Expo.

Today we were thrilled to receive the following email from their teacher:

Good Afternoon, Mr. Pirrone and Mr. Culicerto,

Thanks to you, our entire fifth grade has been able to embrace the engineering design process as they worked in collaborative teams to build and code autonomous robots.  Because of your generosity, 125 students are leaving fifth grade and heading on to middle school with storehouses of sophisticated knowledge regarding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  We cannot thank you enough for investing in the future of each one of these learners.  I’m confident that your investment will yield many returns as you’ve ignited an interest in innovation that will surely impact these students long after fifth grade.  In underwriting Project Redbot, Quality Stone Concepts further propelled 21st century learning.  The unique hands-on inquiry and creative problem solving encountered by each student would not have been possible without you.  I’ve attached several pictures of the students in action with the robots, and I’ve also included a link to my website where we blogged about our endeavors.  Feel free to check out our homeroom happenings on Twitter as well @LCaralivanos.  We tweet frequently about the Redbots.   

Here are some pictures of some students participating in project Redbot: