On May 23 and 24, Mrs. Tricia Finkle and Mrs. Leslie Sem will present at the Dynamic Landscapes 2022 conference at Champlain College in Burlington, VT.

For the past 8 years, Mrs. Tricia Finkle has presented at the Dynamic Landscapes conference. As Mater Christi’s first Makerspace Integrationist, Tricia Finkle synergistically designs deeply contextualized project based learning across the established content curriculum at Mater Christi School. Through collaboration with the school’s entire faculty, Tricia creates effective differentiated, and empathetic learning opportunities, that incorporate a thoughtful combination of hands-on and digital experiences, for all K-8 students. Powerful tools such as TinkerCAD, Lego Mindstorms, Scratch, and Minecraft are fully leveraged to produce maximum and sustained student learning. Tricia is particularly proud of her Elementary Coding curriculum and working with teachers to use coding to enhance traditional learning in subjects like math, writing, and French.

Mrs. Sem has worked at Mater Christi for 18 years in grades 1, 4, and 5, collaborating on STEM projects in these grades with Ms. Finkle. Mrs. Sem works with Mrs. Finkle to develop a K-8 curriculum with the goal of spreading strong visuospatial abilities to understand real situations and imagine complex solutions.

Some of their recent projects are Animating Fractures Fairytales in Grade 3 where students worked on a 3-month long project learning the skills of storytelling, growth mindset, narrative writing, storyboarding, and more. Minecraft Formal Gardens: Integrating 5th Grade Math, Social Studies, Language Arts, Technology Standards with Minecraft, Scratch Fossil project integrating math, science, and technology, 3D Composite Shape integrating math and technology.