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Dot Day is an international celebration of inspiration and creativity. This is a fun one-day celebration that you can implement within your STEM space. After reading the book, The Dot, by Peter H. Reynolds, students have the opportunity to create their Dot that represents them. In today's episode, I will share with you five STEM activities you can implement in your classroom to celebrate this fun day. 

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Dot Day, as described on their website, is celebrated on September 15ish. So really, this means you can celebrate on the day of or choose the day in which you want to celebrate creativity, which can be year-round. I have seen all sorts of posts all over social media over the years. There are schools that go all out on Dot Day and even celebrate for a full month. These activities might not take you a month to complete. They're fairly simple, but they're also engaging and can inspire creativity in your classroom. 

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I tried to choose a variety of things and a variety of media to help you celebrate in a way that would work best for you and for whatever grade levels you teach. Don't worry, there are going to be a lot of links and resources that I'm going to be talking about in this episode. I will link all of them in the show notes so you don't have to pause and write them down. I have done all of the hard work for you. So let's jump into these five Dot Day activities. 

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The first activity is Augmented Reality dots. Just to clarify, here is the difference between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Augmented Reality is seeing things in our world. So it looks like things are popping up right in front of our eyes on our screen. It seems like they are there with us. Virtual Reality is when we are entering a world. So it feels like we are in that space. This activity is about Augmented Reality, bringing these dots to life, and making them pop out on the screen. This activity does require tablets, preferably iPads, and you will download the free app called Quiver. 

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In addition, there is a free coloring sheet where students can design their Dot using markers. When they scan the Dot using the app, it looks like a magical 3D sphere is sitting on the table. This activity is so magical for students, and they love it. It's especially great for the younger grades because there is high engagement and low prep. I recommend for your coloring pages, instead of printing one full page, print four to a page and make sure to have extras because kids want to create an extra to try out other designs. This is also a great takeaway because students can take their coloring sheet and download the app at home to try it out with their families. 

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The next Dot Day activity is sidewalk chalk dots. Of course, you're going to read this story before you do all of these activities. Then you will take your students outside to have them design a Dot that represents them. You can also have them decorate the outside grounds of your school. This is especially great if you teach multiple classes in the day and you can take them to different locations around the building. So by the end of the day, there are colorful dots that are just covering your sidewalks. This activity reminds me of the book The Questionnaires, that I truly love, and the book Aaron's Slater Illustrator, where he designs things in his way. So if you want another book pairing to the Dot, I highly recommend these books. Sidewalk chalk is very easy to get your hands on. My favorite couple places to grab it besides Amazon is the Dollar Tree and the Target dollar spot or even clearance sections. 

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This next Dot Day activity has a couple of different options depending on your available resources. This is all about spiral graph dots. Spiral graphs are so beautiful and have so much symmetry. With the way the lines curve and using different colors within those designs, you can do this activity by using a free spiral graph maker. It didn't require a login when I last used this with students. Students can choose different colors within the palettes on the computer and then choose different spiral graph templates or those spiky things and create different spiral graphs within the different kinds of symmetry. I also found a really cool video that shows different artists and how they use spiral graphs within their artwork, which I also recommend adding in that connection. 

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You can even make this an even more hands-on activity if you have spiral graph templates in your classroom already. I've been lucky and have been able to find some in the Dollar Tree. But also check out Amazon as well because you might be able to find those. So this is a great math and art connection to teach students about symmetry and how it's used in this artwork, and how they could design a fun spiral graph to express their creativity. Now, with the online version, there isn't a way to technically save the spiral graphs. So what I recommend is having students take a screenshot and share it within a platform that you use in your classroom, like Flipgrid, Seesaw, or Google Classroom. 

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The next Dot Day activity is Dot ball launchers. One of my favorite robots to use in the K through five STEM space is the Dash robot by Wonder Workshop. This is not sponsored by them; I'm just recommending this robot. If you want to purchase something for your classroom, the Dash robot is so much fun. There are a lot of different coding options. You can also purchase the external accessory, which is a ball launcher. This is a one day activity. The ball launchers are a little bit finicky. And it's not an accessory I use for a ton of different activities. But it's a whole lot of fun, and the kids love it. 

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Set up the ball launchers, download the ball launcher app that connects to the Dash robots, and have different cups or a one-page target sheet with different identifiers and STEM that students can relate to. These things can be like I am a mathematician, I am a creator, I am an illustrator, and they can be the targets that students are launching the ball toward or the thing that they are identifying with for the day. I have a whole collection of these made. I use these light bulbs with these identifiers in my affirmation station that I talked about in the back-to-school episode of the podcast. So make sure to go back and listen to that episode. But this is a fun way to use that same resource with a hands-on encoding activity. 

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For the launcher, there isn't a whole lot of complicated coding. So if you haven't introduced robots or coding within your classroom yet, you can still do this activity. Again, it's a fun one-day thing to try. I like to put students in groups of three and give them specific jobs, which I like to do with robots. Here are the three jobs that I like to assign in their small groups. First, we have the driver, and they are the one who is holding the device and tapping the code that will launch the ball. The second is the navigator. They aren't necessarily touching the device, but they're watching the driver to ensure they're using the right code to launch the ball correctly. The third job is the retriever, and they're the one, like the name says, who will retrieve the ball. Wherever the ball lands, they can switch off jobs based on their own decisions. Or, if you have groups who have a hard time hogging certain jobs, you can set a timer on your screen, and when the timer goes off, that can signify the switch. So a fine coding activity to bring the Dot Day balls to life. 

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The fifth and final Dot Day activity you can try in your classroom is stop motion dots. I love teaching with stop motion animation. It is a really old filming technique, but it pushes kids to think critically, and problem solve in front of the camera. There isn't much screen time when it comes to stop motion animation. It requires so much patience to make the characters and objects move smoothly in front of the camera. In reality, it is just a click of a button to put all the pictures together. My favorite app for stop motion animation on tablets is Stop Motion. I will link that in the show notes. There is a paid version. You can get it, but you don't have to. It works a lot bthan just having kids take a bunch of pictures all at once and just scrolling through the camera roll. 

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If you're using Chromebooks, laptops, or tablets, there are a couple of Chrome extensions that I've played around with before. Or you could get the Hue Document camera. There is actually a whole line of software that goes along with the stop motion animation. For their Dot, for this activity, students can use modeling clay. My favorite clay is the Crayola modeling clay because it's super cheap, and it doesn't dry out, which is awesome. You can reuse it over and over again. Students can create a Dot that will roll into the screen, transform it into something that represents them, and then roll off of this screen. So if I were to create my Dot, I would, of course, have a hot pink Dot, but you all knew that by now. I'm sure I would have a hot pink Dot ball that would roll onto this screen, and possibly transform into a podcast mic. I could add other colors, and then it could squish down back into its pink little ball and roll off the screen. This will be a great way to introduce stop motion animation. It's a pretty easy activity but will take a lot of patience and collaboration to make it all work. 

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As a recap, here are the five STEM inspired Dot Day activities you can try in your classroom. First is the Augmented Reality dots. Next, the chalk dots. Third, the spiral graph dots. Fourth, Dot launchers, and fifth, the stop motion animation dots. Again, all of the resources I mentioned will be linked in the show notes, so you don't have to remember them. If you try any of these in your classrooms, tag me on Instagram at Naomi Meredith underscore. I would love to see how I helped inspire creativity in your classroom.