Students started their day with class 2 of 3 of the Blocksmith virtual reality coding lessons with Ryan Durfee, of BSU. Today's lesson was on how to program a 3-dimensional Space Invaders-style game using the program. Some of the components got pretty complex, but the students did their best to follow along and even did some experimental programming and design of their own.

After the morning coding session, there was some time for students to update and polish their digital portfolios that will be available to share with parents and guardians after next week's class when they complete their reflections and goals. As students get older, the projects get bigger, so the mechanical costume project takes center stage on this semester's portfolio.

To finish the day, students were introduced to a poetry memorization challenge. They were given 7 diverse poets' biographies and used their interest in the poets' stories to chose their favorite writer. Then, they chose their favorite of that poet's poems (from a selection I curated) and will work to memorize it. This will be a practice that we circle back to over their last semester in GATE in ensure the poem is in the students' long term memory. We will also examine the merits or poetry memorization, poetry interpretation, and poetry creation. To check out the poets and poems the students chose from, click here.