Riverview School District introduces robotics initiative for 2025-26

Cathy Favo wants her students to be equipped to explore any job they might want to pursue when they get older.

In her sixth grade STEAM classes at Riverview School District, Favo teaches her students about topics such as coding, engineering and design.

“(The class) is meant to give the kids opportunities and skills that they’ll need in a workplace that is just so rapidly changing,” Favo said.

Thanks to a grant from the Arconic Foundation, Tenth Street and Verner elementary students will be adding robotics to their class syllabus in the upcoming school year, said district business manager, Sheila Lubert.

In addition to her sixth grade class, Favo is also the district’s kindergarten through eighth grade STEM coordinator.

“I’ve been working with teachers to include block-based coding in their classroom practice,” Favo said.

She said the “natural shift” is to have students develop their text-coding skills. They will be doing this with the Riverview Robotics Initiative using VEX Robotics, an educational robotics program designed to engage students in STEM through hands-on learning.

Students will be using robotics kits that emphasize design, engineering, and block and text coding skills. Lubert said the grant covered $30,000 of the almost $36,000 cost for the kits and lesson plans.

Favo said she has be spending some of the summer break learning to use the VEX kits so she can assign student activities.

The kits will lend to the overall computer science literacy of the students, she said.

“Our job market is showing that we need people with computer science experience and the skills that come along with it,” Favo said.

The STEAM class teaches students life lessons in addition to technological ones, Favo said. Students are given tasks to challenge their problem-solving skills, encourage collaboration and how to work through setbacks when their ideas don’t initially pan out.

“It builds a lot of the skill set you need going into the workforce because these kids are going to need to learn new things regularly,” Favo said.