You know, one thing teachers used to always say to me is, how am I supposed to do robotics when I already have a busy schedule? And my answer would always be the same. Try to incorporate it into what you're already doing. And that's exactly what Jamal's been doing. Under his leadership, robotics has been integrated into the curriculum across Henry County, sparking a passion for students through practical real-world applications.

So please join me in giving Jamal a very warm welcome. (audience claps)

So yeah, when I put this title together, I was a little apprehensive because the word physics is in it, and people are automatically running away from physics. But I think that your predisposition towards physics will shift. I've kind of got my slide deck not exactly in the best order, so I think I should introduce myself first.

I've been in education for 20, 24 years, roughly 16 years as a teacher. I initially taught biology. I was a biology undergrad, minored in chemistry, and wanted to be pre-med. I took the MCAT, realized that wasn't happening for me, worked in a hospital, and didn't really realize it wasn't happening. So then I became a teacher. I've been in a leadership position as the science coordinator in Atlanta public schools for five years. Then I came to Henry County, which is a suburb of Atlanta, south of Atlanta, and was the coordinator of STEM. They told me, well, you're not the science coordinator, you're not the math coordinator, you're not in the IT department, and you're not CTE, so here you go. I was really trying to find my way.

Our strategic plan had us investing in robotics, and that's where I really dove in. I had no background. I had VEX GO kits in my office, and I decided I was gonna build all of them. This is a three-five program, so I'll kind of show you those things. My area, I ended up teaching physics for nine of those years in the classroom, which was the best thing that ever happened to me. I got ball and told that I was teaching physics. I feel bad for my students the first couple of years, but once I got the swing of things, it got much better.

I have four daughters, ages 7, 10, 16, and 18. So my disposition on women in STEM is obviously anchored in my everyday life. What we'll do today is I'll clarify, give you our vision, and then we'll talk about how I integrated robotics and physics into the curriculum from K through 12, not just in the high school space. There's a huge misconception that physics requires a certain grade level. But there are a lot of preconceptions that young children have about physics that I realized as a high school teacher. When I would get my students who were already in Duke, they were going to Duke, they were going to Stanford, and they couldn't read a motion graph, they didn't understand the idea of acceleration, and I couldn't figure out why. Super smart kids, but just all these misconceptions passed along.

Then I'll talk about the actual teaching. So I've already introduced myself. What did we do? Our strategic plan actually had STEM in it, which typically the strategic plan for a district is: can they read, can they do math? How do they feel? We're gonna focus on those things. We're gonna look at metrics tied to those. Our strategic plan actually looked at STEM. We made an investment of a million dollars in robotics from K-12. It was in chunks. I put on the screen here just so you could see that we have 18, 1, 2, 3 kids in every elementary school. We have an elementary STEM lab teacher. We had 29, now we have 30, we're opening a 30th, which I was lucky enough to be able to design that room. The new STEM classroom at this new elementary school has a sliding garage door that takes them out into the courtyard for them to do agricultural investigations.

We live in a community that's highly agricultural in nature. We have several farms. So we bought VEX 123, 18 of those. We did buy Lego because we wanted them to build some things, even though you can build with VEX 123, that's been the primary. VEX 123 was probably the biggest hit of any of the stuff we bought.

First thing we got was VEX GO. We had 23, we're adding 10, actually, I'm telling VEX that. So hopefully they have some classroom bundles that they can ship once we buy them. And then who said that? Okay, perfect. And then we have VEX IQ. We had a certain amount of money that we spent for VEX IQ. So there are 55 VEX IQ robots in every middle school engineering lab, which is a massive amount, right?

In high school, we bought VEX EXP. So every class got 20 of those. We bought one competition kit and the game and all the parts for every high school, even though not all of our schools have a competition team. Very few actually do. And then we bought some UB tech.

One of the things, kind of the foundations over there, is that we wrote scripted lessons. So when I got VEX GO, I immediately started writing scripted lessons in the instructional framework. VEX has great blueprints and all the handouts that are in Google Docs you can customize. It was really cool. So I was able to go through and write those and then tie them to our standards. Look at our pacing from math and science, and you'll see some samples. I'll be happy if you email me to give you a sample lesson just so you can look at it.

We also have computer science in every middle school that's required by law in Georgia. Next year it's computer science in every high school. So we wrote scripted computer science lessons for middle school using a plethora of resources because we didn't have IQ. Now that I've learned how to data log next door, I went to all these workshops, that will be our foundation for them using the sensors to collect data so that they can really analyze that data.

Because one thing that I keep hearing in all these sessions with all these very smart people is computer science cannot be divorced from the output or the content. A lot of times people think they code for the sake of coding. We're trying to take it where the output device is actually the IQ robot. So, and I'll show you kind of how we did that.

We have an engineering lab and teacher in every middle school. And so everything we did, you can see, I mean we have everything that's on this screen. So what are we doing to level it up? To level it up, we purchased a tower garden for every elementary school STEM lab. We bought some probes so that those probes can be used to check pH temperature, you know, in the room, all those different things associated with agriculture.

You can see some other kids. We have Makey Makeys for electricity, and then we're about to make an investment. We're gonna send two work cells to every middle school. So they'll have the VEX Workcell. Then I'm going to use videos and Twitter to go to local companies and say, I need 20,000 maybe more dollars to get two for every high school in our district so that there's a transition.

We really, the focus of this after sitting in the workshop yesterday is this will be predominantly in the middle school as an arm. So when you think about middle school engineering, and this will tie back into physics, and our middle school engineering, and maybe in yours as well, depends on your state. There's a sixth grade, a seventh grade, and eighth grade class. In our district, there's 18 weeks. So typically what happens is there's standards. So there's a standard on safety in every single grade level clearly, 'cause we have a laser cutter, we'll have a 3D printer that is all the same brand. We'll have a mold maker in addition to this. And the 55 robots, which in some schools haven't really come out of the box yet because we got a midyear.

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And it was just kind of like, and they're middle school teachers, so no disrespect to middle school, but there's so much going on that it was like, eh. So the idea is they rotate through stations. The mold maker, the 3D printer, and the laser cutter will really help them if they have an interest when they get to high school in engineering, drafting, design, and architecture. The robotic arm will help them if they're into mechatronics, robotics, and engineering automation. And then obviously the VEX IQ robots, computer science, and engineering.

So the idea is, they get all those foundations in middle school and when they go to high school, they have a choice as to which pathway they choose to go through. We have an academy, so some of those pathways, they would have to opt to go to the academy for those pathways. The document at the bottom here is our pacing. We actually took the standards and designed our own pacing. The beginning is just getting them to understand careers in engineering in sixth grade, safety, and then the history of innovation. Then they learn the universal systems model and the engineering design process. The majority of the semester, they pick one of those devices, whether it be the mold makers, and they do their own project. So that's kind of the ideation behind that. They level it up each year. So that's kind of where we're going.

I'm working on scripted lessons for engineering, which is why I look crazy. I'm a director over science, CTAE, which is CTE in most places, STEM design, and health and PE. People say, you know, I like to write curriculum, I like to be in the schools. They say, well, you are a director, you're not supposed to be in the school. So if you're a district leader and they tell you you're not supposed to do something, I think you should do it. I think you should go to the schools, because the reason we ordered what we're ordering is because we're listening to what teachers are saying they need. You can give them all the resources in the world, but if you don't align it to the standards in your state and the expectations of your district and the framework that your district provides, it's gonna be that user empathy that Tim alluded to earlier.

So why are we doing all this? Because in 2026/2027, we're opening a STEM high school. I have never shown this blueprint to anyone. So you're in Texas, I'm in Georgia, you're all over the country and world, you may not care. But the idea is, and I'm gonna come up and touch the screen, maybe that's not what you're supposed to do. But this is a three-story part of the building, which you obviously can't see the other three stories. There's a courtyard that's open, all glass, and then it's inside the center of the building. And then there's wings. We have a school of biotech, a school of aerospace engineering, and a school of sustainability. All those courses and coursework have been designed.

What students will do is they'll come to that school, it's a lottery, I think is what we're gonna do, about 200 to 250 per grade level, so you're talking max a thousand kids, and they'll choose to be in an AI or an engineering. They'll have to be in an AI and engineering pathway. Initially, I had embedded computing, but I was like, eh, AI's coming, let's grab onto it. I think Jason talked about embracing the constraint and running towards it. So I really dove into that idea. Then they'll choose. So the idea is if they have the AI and the engineering, they'll apply that to the biotechnology when they specialize. They'll apply it to the aerospace when they specialize. They'll apply it to the sustainability. So that's kind of the, for lack of a better term, that's the north star instructionally, right?

The North Star competition-wise is we had a team actually get to the dome this year. Our gremlin team, which had nothing to do with me, just great sponsor, great kids.

Thank you for your attention and support.

We did try to give them what they needed, but they did all the work. And so that's the north star for competition. It's kind of a double-edged approach.

We also designed an engineering continuum because people argue with me, saying, "Well, the VEX GO, this is a scripted build, that's not engineering." I would argue that it is engineering. While the build is scripted, the outcome and how they program it is not scripted. The ideation around that is not scripted.

So we developed an engineering continuum using the MIT committee for the study of invention and innovation. On one end of it, you have a routine predetermined problem. The product is predetermined. Examples include a VEX Robotics build for a base bot. As you move in and move up, you get to more innovative solutions using these resources.

When you invest money in something as a district person, I believe you invest the time to calibrate and get people prepared to use the resource. This is our continuum. I'll share this with you as well if you email me. I probably should have put together a Google folder and just given it to you. But I was in so many sessions that I changed my presentation because I was so inspired to do that.

So how do we integrate physics? When we talk about physics, I've kind of got this Venn diagram that I came up with. I used some of the standards for mathematical practice as well as some of the foundational things associated with each area. For physical science content, you have the science and the math. They're very well connected.

With engineering, I feel like attending to precision is key. The idea of robotics involves building the robot and then coding the robot to do something. The science content, the coding, the computational thinking—that's the overlap. The nexus is the lessons. I'm big on curriculum. My PhD is in Curriculum and Instruction, so to look at how you integrate physics, the physics topics I felt were connected to the VEX Robotics kits we have were force motions, simple machines, electricity, and magnetism.

Robotics is clearly engineering, coding robots to collect data, using products to collect data. Data would be motion force, looking at the data associated with that. Once I show you the middle school format, you'll see that. These are Georgia standards. This is a vertical articulation map that I made.

In kindergarten, they talk about objects in motion, forces, pushes, and pulls. In grade two, they talk about push and pulling and its effect on motion. All of these things are built and scaffolded on top of each other. In grade four, in our state, this is how the vertical articulation for physical sciences, specifically forces in motion, is structured. I have this for forces in motion in Georgia, electricity, magnetism, waves, energy, and all those things.

The key is to make sure that all these things are tied together and that you can see. If kids in high school physical science struggle, then maybe I should go back and see what they learned in grade four to try to make sense of what they are missing. Simple machines are typically not an issue. Mechanical advantage, work, and efficiency are issues. We utilize these domains to build capacity. That's part of the phase.

So how do we integrate it? I just use an example with VEX. You can do this with anything that you teach. For example, in kindergarten, the standard talks about motions of objects based on physical attributes when a force is applied.

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So there's a VEX123 board. I'll show you a sample of one. And on that board, you might have a Bucky ball, you might have a tri ball, you might have a regular ball, you might have a ring. How does the shape of that object affect the motion? So you could tell the kids, put the little coder on there, and we do mostly touch coding in kindergarten, 'cause the slider's a little much for them, they're not reading yet. And so I'll say, okay, which of these things rolls in the direction you push it? If you push it in that direction, it's absolutely gonna go that. And then they would code the little 123 bot to go to that picture, right? So it's the idea of using that.

For fourth grade, for grade two, same thing. And now in fourth grade, I mean second grade, excuse me, you would take the robot and actually use, what is it called, pipe cleaners and put them around the little rings that go on top and put a block in it and drag it. So in kindergarten, they understand how shape affects motion. In second grade, they actually use the bot to actually drag something. And then when they get to fourth grade, they build an incline plane and a wheel, which is one of the best lessons.

And so this is kind of what it looks like. You can see there's materials, which is, it's not a small. There's an opening, a transition to work session, and then a work session with one of the five E's in there. All the handouts are embedded. They don't go find anything on Teachers Pay Teachers. They don't have to create anything. It's already done. And then there's an image of what it should look like. And it's labeled so that there's no confusion. So the teacher knows exactly what it should look like when they're done building it. This is just a one-page of a couple of page document, not several pages, I think it's two or three pages. So it's a daily lesson. When I say daily, that means one chunk of learning. That doesn't mean one day. And that's kind of what I try to help my principals understand. It doesn't mean one day and it may not get through this in one day.

And so then the integration here, this is a middle school lesson. And you know, I like to touch the screen, sorry, I apologize if I'm not supposed to do that. But at the top, you can see far over, it's exploring speed, velocity, and distance. And so there's an opening, a work period, and explore and explain. And so in this process, the idea is that they build the robot, right? They engineer the base bot, and then they code the base bot to collect data, right? And so that's how we integrate it in the middle school space.

This is an example of a board. If you want to know, use Google Draw. Find a picture, cut it down to 2.5 by 2.5, and that will fit perfectly in these squares. We already have these pre-made for our teachers. All they have to do is cut them out, put them on the board. This is one for day and night sky. So the kid will start the robot here and I'll say code it to go to natural sources, I'm sorry, versus manmade sources of light. Go to the manmade sources of light. And they have to figure out how to touch code it to get to all of the, you know, the manmade sources of light. And then do the same thing for natural light. And so you can see this, this is actually a picture of our students doing that.

There's also this tablet code. So we start with touch code in kindergarten and then this is our K-2 robotic solution. And then they go and they do the tablet code. They start transitioning to tablet in first and maybe full on in second, okay? So that's kind of how we integrated it in the K-2 space. And the 3-5 space you've already seen. This is the first page of that lesson that I just showed you with the incline plane. We took a screenshot of all the resources. We told teachers, don't give them the whole suitcase full of stuff. Put it in a Ziploc bag. Here's all the things you need. It tells you the number, what the part is, right?

And then over here where it says handouts, those are all the hyperlinked handouts. So they don't have to find anything. There's a teacher portal, there's a link to the teacher portal on VEX. There's a link to the PowerPoint. There's a teacher lesson overview that we pulled from VEX. So all this stuff, we moved it into our drive, made a copy, and moved it into our drive. And then the teachers click on it, and it takes them straight to it. So all the handouts that they need, all the materials you can see there's a materials list. All they need is a meter stick, a protractor, and VEX GO robotics kit. All the parts that they need, right?

So there's curricular standards, a brief summary of the content, the driving question, all the standards for Georgia across the board. Then technology integration, then what they need, materials and handouts. And then on the second page, this is a unit overview. Let's say you're a new teacher, you don't know science. Here's all the content you need to be able to understand incline planes. The idea that the reason something rolls down an incline plane is because gravity's pulling down the plane, and the incline plane just happens to be in the way of it falling straight down, which is what makes slides fun. Kids don't have that conceptualization. They think the slide is pulling it down, which is a misconception about the idea that gravity pulls everything down. And if there's something that's in the way of that.

So when they get to AP physics and they have to figure out the forces on an incline, they're not confused. They don't have to unlearn to relearn. Because learning how to draw a free body diagram on an incline plane is no joke. And finding gravity in the Y and gravity in the X, the force of gravity in Y and the X when you break that up is really challenging. But if they have this preconception and understand there's an incline plane that's in the way of that gravitational force. And that's why things slide down if the force is greater than friction is the key, okay? So that's a science piece.

And then we also put in the math content knowledge. In addition, we alphabetized general and domain-specific academic language. We have a literacy crisis. And the last thing I want my district to do is buy a bunch of books, right, and invest in ELA resources. So I'm trying to use our robotics kits to promote literacy, right, disciplinary literacy. I'm reading a book as if I'm an engineer. I'm reading a book as if I'm a physicist versus I'm reading a book to cite textual evidence and summarize. So the academic language piece is huge. We put both the math and the ELA, I'm sorry, math and the science language, right? And so that's kind of, this came from a Georgia DOE screenshot from that because this is the standard.

And so here you have, this is an eighth-grade sample. And so kind of what I want to emphasize is that there's an opening work period closing. They build the robot in their engineering class, right? And then they code it in their computer science class. And then they collect the data in their science and math classes, right? So people say, well, what if the kids don't have engineering, they all have eighth-grade science, but they don't have engineering. My argument is then you collaborate with that engineering teacher and you use what they build, transition it to computer science. The kids in computer science use robots that they may or may not have built, code those robots, and then they take those to their science class and they collect the data.

So in this specific one, they build it, they do the blueprint, the VEX parts ruler for IQ. Pointer number one, if you have VEX IQ and you don't use a parts ruler, you will want to throw things. I learned that over Christmas break when I broke out the IQ kit and couldn't figure out why I was using the wrong parts. So I have this handout.

Thank you for your attention and dedication to enhancing our educational resources. Your efforts in integrating technology and promoting literacy are invaluable.

So initially, they collect distance. When you're studying motion, you want to look at the change in position. Then you throw in time and start talking about speed and velocity. The change in that speed or velocity is where you go from there.

The other thing I want to say about coding is that I require or ask the teachers, though they don't have to listen to me because I can't watch all of them, to use pseudo code before they let kids actually code. I don't want them going into trial and error. Now, there's going to be trial and error. I learned that when I was playing freeze tag yesterday. There's some trial and error, right? But if I do pseudo code first, my conceptualization of programming is significantly better than if I just start putting blocks in, right? So that's really the conceptual ideation around that.

So you can see on this, you may not be able to see, but a pseudo code sheet. Then there's a data collection sheet. I'm really trying to create a holistic experience for kids in K-5 and 6-8 where their ELA block in elementary is not divorced from their STEM lab special. Their science block, which is usually like 30 minutes, is not divorced from their STEM lab experience. Learning the content, applying the content. That's really the kind of ideation.

We have a digital platform. And so in that, again, to try to get buy-in, right, I don't know if you've all read the book, it's called "Atomic Habits." Make it easy, people will do it; make it hard, they won't do it. You gotta click on seven things, you're not using it. You gotta click on one thing, you're using it. That's the ideation here. So we have a platform, it's a LMS, it's called Henry Connects. And so you click on, I'm just showing an example. This one sells. I made a VEX GO plant cell build on my own. I just kind of was like, oh, this would be cool because plant cells are square, animal cells are, you know, irregularly shaped. And that's one of the big things in fifth grade that they can look at them under a microscope. And the first way they can identify a plant cell, and I'm going away from physics a little bit when I say that, is to see shape. So I really utilized the VEX GO plant model idea.

And so when you click on it, I made infographics using Adobe Express. It used to be called Adobe Spark. I can't draw. So the idea is that these are numbered. So first they do this, second they do this. It's just a quick overview. And then if you go down here and you were to click on any of these, all the documents are there. The unit planning guide, which is what we just looked at, the daily instructional lessons, the parent letters home. I did this for all of K-5 before we got STEM lab teachers. And as we got them, because I was ahead, I was able to work on quarter three and quarter one, that kind of idea.

One of my STEM lab teachers, because I made that investment in time, she took Canva and made all the slide decks for everything I did. So there are slide decks in here. We got a library, we got a media, our media specialist ordered books for our STEM lab teachers. I was like, I don't know how I'm gonna get through all these. And one of my STEM lab teachers said, since you did this, here's a spreadsheet with all the grade levels and standard alignments, and it's copy and paste, and they can check the books out. So putting that work in on the front end, really, again, if you're a district person, and I know time is of the essence, as a director, I was a coordinator, I could do all this as a director, I'm trying to write engineering lessons, order the, you know, get the idea of what we're ordering for the STEM high school. We've got these other specialty programs that I'm trying to manage as well, so it's overwhelming. But this is kind of that, and I put look familiar, but in Georgia, we have this same platform. So over there, you can see STEM kindergarten.

Thank you for your attention and support. I hope this information is helpful and inspires you to integrate these ideas into your own teaching practices.

When you open it up, you get this for kindergarten, and then all of those infographics and all of the documents that you would need to teach are in one platform. So let's talk about conceptual understanding. This is hopefully why you came. Hopefully, you're getting something from this. The idea is you use VEX123 in the kindergarten space to classify types of motion based on attributes, right? You could even look at buoyancy because there is a standard in Georgia that talks about buoyancy, which is a force. They use VEX123, as I alluded to earlier, to drag something physically with the little 123 bot, right? The idea is they identify to classify and they observe to define. That's the key in K and two.

In grade four, they engineer the incline plane and wheel, and you can adjust the angle. They measure the angle because the angles are a fourth-grade standard. They can also modify the wheel, put tape on the wheel, or add more weight on it, less weight on it. There's a lot of ideation around that. The idea is they connect, synthesize, and conceptualize content, right? This all builds off of each other.

In VEX IQ in middle school, they actually take all that knowledge, hopefully that they've learned, and gather distance data, calculate speed velocity, and graph data. All these things tie together. Trying to create a vertical articulation and a horizontal articulation is key, right? Conceptual understanding comes from when you take resources and write lessons. Those lessons lead to learning. There are teachers who are great. Some of my teachers, I've given them lessons, and they tell me, I don't like this, change this, or you taught AP physics. For a kindergartner, you need to scale this down. Getting that feedback is crucial. Even right now, we're processing and reworking some of the lessons, right? I'm going to pull in what I learned and add that.

I know they talked about VEX Workcell, but to start off, a great idea is using data logging to analyze motion data using the inertial sensor. You can do that in IQ and EXP. This helps kids understand the idea that if something's moving in the positive direction and accelerating in the positive direction, it is speeding up. If something's moving in the positive direction and accelerating in the negative direction, it's slowing down. Everybody's like, okay, that's fine. But what's confusing is when you're going in the negative direction that you've decided is negative, and your acceleration is in the negative direction, kids will say, oh, it's slowing down. No, it's speeding up in the negative direction. This inertial sensor and the data you get from that table using a micro SD card will show kids those values and let them see the robot speeding up, right? They can get that data and have it going in the negative direction, and it'll give them those values, right? That was an epiphany.

This is a brand new slide, right? If I stumbled through it, it's because I'm still internalizing those workshops. The other thing is the Workcell. When I taught physics, the coordinate plane was the biggest headache in the world, right? With this Workcell, the idea that the robot, the arm itself, has positive X, positive Y, you know, all the directions are on the robot. When they see the arm moving up and they're having to put those values in for X, Y, and Z, it really helps them understand that. If I give them just this drawing and say, all right, here's the X, Y, and Z plane, let's start plotting some points, they're like, what? But if they can see the arm moving that way and actually look at the values, right, and understand that, that gives them a conceptual understanding of what position in space is, right?

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And this is related to graphing. So that really, to me, that was like we had decided to order 22 work cells anyway, and we're ordering one for our virtual school, like our hybrid school. We had decided to do that anyway because everything we've ordered from VEX has been quality. Then you sit in this workshop and you realize there's so many implications for how using this in their middle school and high school can be tied into their physical science and physics classes. So really just looking at those connections, I need to get going 'cause I've got.

So what's my system of implementation? These are all students, by the way, in Henry County. This is the ramp. We actually bought them this, you know, not to plug in another company, but the one thing Sphero has that's cool is this tape that has measurements on it that are metrics. So they just tape it to the ground, and we bought rolls of that. They were like confused, like why are you buying this, but you're not buying our bot. I'm like, well, we need the tape, we don't need the box. We got the box. And so you can see this is, I think this might've been at our STEM camp, but really trying to utilize all the resources.

The idea is you align the standards, you adopt the resource, you assemble the lessons based off the resource, you attach it to a digital platform, and then you analyze the usage and implementation. Via observation, our platform actually lets you see how many times teachers click on a resource to use it. And then that QR code is my business card that I made last night. So if it looks stupid, sorry. And then I have an X or Twitter, whatever they call it now. And that's my handle. And that's my email. So if you, I'll put stuff in a folder and just, if you email me, I'll just share that with you.

Do y'all have any questions? I know I went fast. I was like, I got 30 minutes and I wanna take questions.

You did great. Thank you very much for your presentation. I just have one question on your mold maker. Through your research, what mold maker manufacturer did you buy? Which one? I'm sorry. What mold maker, manufacturer. Mold maker. It's called the Mayku, M-A-Y-K-U. And it's out of England actually. And you know why I bought it because my CTE director bought it for a middle school and the other middle school's like, why don't I have that? So I'm like, I guess I gotta order nine more of these. And I had money. So I did that. It's pretty cheap too to make you form maker. It's not the monumental, but it's cool.

Where are you getting all of this money? (audience laughs)

So our prior superintendent was a chemistry teacher and she loves STEM. So we had, that was East lost, which is a tax, right? And we put that money. I also was given $10,000 per elementary STEM lab to buy things, which is why I bought probeware, I bought consistent kits. Okay, there's a gap here. I'm gonna buy a kit to plug that gap. I don't buy whole program things with the exception of this robotics. That's the only thing I've ever bought, hook line and sinker. I chunk things. Well, this company makes the best rotational and inertia kit. This company makes the best waves kit, you know, right. And I don't have something. So that's one way.

The other way is the ARPA money, which was from COVID. I have about $300,000 for middle school engineering. And so I'm strategically spending it like, and then we had capital accumulation funds that were left over. So that's why we're ordering 10 more of the VEX GO kits. 'Cause they have 23 in every STEM lab, but they see all the kids. So I want to get as many as I can so they don't have to deconstruct what they're building, especially for like the Mars Rover build that they do in fourth grade. So the money comes from that. People took their ARPA money and I'm not sure they thought through how they were gonna spend it. And we really sat down and thought about how we were gonna elevate what we're doing.

To be honest with you, I'm here at this conference, and you know, you've got Brentwood Academy. There are like seven teams there that are potentially going to make it. You have all these school districts, like the Colorado districts such as St. Vrain, doing all these wonderful things. I'm in Georgia, and I'm like, I want to be like them. You should have something that you aspire to be and be humble enough to say, "We're not there yet, but if I'm smart enough to listen to people, then I can get there." We have the money, but that money's going away. So, I'm trying to make sure that I have as much as I can and a plan for those things. They want to invest in us.

I think we'll have time for one more question, then you guys can obviously meet with Jamal for the rest of the day.

First of all, I just want to say thank you very much for your presentation. From the St. Vrain Valley School District, we invite you to come visit us. Yeah, I gotta talk them into giving the plane ticket, but that is on my list. That, and there's a school in Taiwan. I met a guy yesterday, and it was like a TED talk listening to him. I just had to take notes nonstop.

I just want to say, I just want to compliment you on what you're doing. It's very difficult to do horizontal and vertical alignment, so congrats on doing that. Thank you.

Regarding the Mayku form machine, it's actually now based out of the US. You can get it—I forgot—but you can get it out of the US now. So, for teachers where we can't buy from overseas, you can do that now, and I can give you the contact there. Awesome.

One of the things that leads very well into your engineering is that one of the first things to get kids started is we actually made chocolate molds. I saw that in the video. Yeah. So, it's really doable. Kids love it. People love it. And once they see that, they're gonna give you money for that. Okay, I'll take that note. You heard it here first.

You had the AI, the kids that did the AI right, the parts. I was like, I'm glad I'm not going after them.

All right, let's give Jamal a warm thank you.

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