A visit to Andy Zellers' Tech Ed class at GHMS reveals something remarkable — 330 students building, coding, and problem-solving their way into the future.

When CVEF visited Andy Zellers' Technology and Engineering Education class at Gerald Huesken Middle School recently, we found 7th graders genuinely absorbed in their work — building, tinkering, debugging code, and figuring out how to make things actually move. It's hands-on learning in the best sense.

That's thanks in part to a grant from the Conestoga Valley Education Foundation. With $16,066.90 in funding, Zellers purchased a suite of Hummingbird STEAM Robotic Kits from BirdBrain Technologies — 50 premium kits paired with Micro:Bit controllers, plus starter packs for rovers, catapults, and animatronics that introduce students to the platform before they tackle their own designs.

When CVEF recently visited, students were working on their first independent projects. Some groups were engineering a traffic light with coded stop-and-go sequences they had to troubleshoot and refine. Others were building animatronic creatures programmed to react with surprise when touched. And some were constructing robotic drummers — coded to keep beat with a song. None of it was simple, and the room had the feel of real problem-solving underway: students conferring, testing, failing, and trying again.

That combination of physical building and coding is exactly what Zellers has been looking for. As he explains in his grant application, students learn far more about programming when there's a physical device that actually runs their code. The kits work with multiple free platforms — Snap!, Python, Scratch — and the unit is designed to scaffold: three structured challenges build the skills students need before they design and program an entirely original robot of their own.

Projects like this one are exactly what the Conestoga Valley Education Foundation's grant program is designed to support: innovative, creative ideas from CV educators that enrich the classroom experience in ways the regular school budget can't always make possible.