Wonder Workshop Launches Wonder League Robotics Clubs to Inspire Future Inventors
$10,000 Grant will be Awarded to District with Highest Percentage of Participating Schools
Wonder Workshop, creators of robots that teach students foundational skills in computer coding, invites schools to participate in the newly announced Wonder League Robotics Clubs, the first network of clubs in elementary schools for coding and robotics. The school district that gets the highest percentage of schools participating by July 10, 2016 will receive a $10,000 grant in Wonder Store credit to help fund their clubs.
"Robotics is the new team sport for our youngest learners," said Vikas Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Wonder Workshop. "We want to extend a worldwide community of Wonder League clubs to inspire the creators of tomorrow through robotics and coding. Launching a club helps students develop problem solving and creativity skills, build meaningful relationships with their peers and have fun as they explore STEM."
Wonder League Robotics Clubs are open to students between the ages of 6 and 12, and no previous experience in coding and robotics is required. Teachers will need one Dash & Dot set for every group of three students in order to get started. Wonder Workshop provides a Getting Started Guide for Dash & Dot as well as materials to assist in club promotion, a guide to help schools secure funding for Dash & Dot robots, an activity guide with new coding challenges released every two weeks and access to a network of fellow club leaders throughout the nation.
Every year, the clubs participate in the worldwide Wonder League Robotics Competition, which attracted 1,150 teams (and 5,000 students) from 48 states during 2015, its inaugural year. The competition, which will begin on October 3, 2016 and end on December 12, 2016, will divide clubs into two age brackets and includes a first-place prize of a STEM grant for a school or nonprofit of the teams choice. This year, the competition will guide students through lessons that focus on how to conserve energy, water and waste and minimize effects on the environment.
In addition to the $10,000 Wonder Store grant, Wonder Workshop will give free Wonder League t-shirts to the first 1,000 clubs to register, and will pick five clubs each week to receive a Dash & Dot combo pack between May 10 and July 10, 2016.
To receive information on how to launch Wonder League Robotics Clubs at your school, visit clubs.makewonder.com.
For press materials, please visit: https://www.makewonder.com/mediakit.
About Dash & Dot
Dash & Dot are award-winning, hands-on learning tools that teach K-5 students creative problem solving, coding and robotics. Designed for teachers to use alongside classroom-tested, Common Core-aligned curriculum built by fellow educators, Dash & Dot encourage interest in STEM fields at formative ages and across gender lines. Both robots arrive ready-to-use, yet they are highly customizable for creative learning applications. Dash & Dot interact through Wonder Workshops five mobile applications, allowing children to extend learning into the physical classroom and bring STEM concepts to life. Applications for Dash & Dot are intuitive to allow students to translate ideas into visual, picture-based coding. Wonder Workshop apps that come along with the robots are compatible with more than 25 iOS, Kindle, and Android devices including the iPad 3, iPad mini, iPad Air 1 & 2 and a variety of Nexus and Samsung Galaxy devices.
About Wonder Workshop
Wonder Workshop launched Dash & Dot in December 2014 and within its first month, delivered more than $3.5M in robots to 37 countries including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, European countries, India, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Today, Dash & Dot are in more than 1000 elementary classrooms. Based in San Mateo, CA, Wonder Workshop was founded in 2012 by Vikas Gupta, Saurabh Gupta and Mikal Greaves, inventors, designers, programmers and parents with the mission to make coding a new creative tool that is accessible for children from age five and beyond. The company has currently raised $15.9 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group, CRV, WI Harper, Google Ventures, Bright Success Capital, Maven Ventures, Vikas Gupta, Reza Hussein and Jeff Schox. For more information, visit http://www.makewonder.com.
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