Create. Design. Think. Explore.

In keeping with our commitment to creative expression, students at St. Thomas’s Day School visit the Innovation Lab several times a week to create, design, think, explore, and problem-solve while learning to use technology. Students are exposed to a variety of technology tools that will enhance their learning and support the acquisition of technical skills. The goal is for students to actively and creatively use technology as a tool for learning.

Unplugged Curriculum

  • Kindergarten (Explorer): Students focus on unplugged foundations such as sequencing movement, identifying patterns, and building basic physical structures like towers to develop persistence.
  • Grade 1 (Maker): The curriculum introduces precise logic (IF/THEN/ELSE) and foundational concepts like binary code and coordinate grids, all taught through active movement and hands-on building sprints.
  • Grade 2 (Designer): Students move into optimization and abstract thinking, learning to find the “shortest route” (efficiency) and using variables and functions to control complex physical sequences.

Digital Computing Curriculum

  • Grade 3 (The Digital Milestone): Students transition to digital tools on Chromebooks, mastering document formatting, interactive storytelling, 3D modeling in Tinkercad, and basic robotics.
  • Grade 4 (Community Innovator): The focus shifts to empathy and designing for others, with projects in collaborative publishing, accessibility engineering, and programming robots to sense and respond to their environment.
  • Grade 5 (Future City Innovator): Students apply systems thinking to map complex city infrastructures, while advancing into app prototyping, physical computing with micro:bits, and green-screen media production.
  • Grade 6 (Innovation Leader): The journey culminates in independent problem-solving, where students master web design (HTML/CSS), evaluate media for AI manipulation, and execute a self-directed Capstone Innovation Project