Berkeley County School District in South Carolina keeps about 35 Climate Action Kits in circulation, and almost none of them live in a classroom. They live with a team of about seven instructional coaches, who carry them into schools from kindergarten up and stay to help run the lesson. That one logistical choice is what makes the rest of this story possible.
The Climate Action Kit pairs the BBC micro:bit with sensors, motors, and reusable build parts, plus lessons that tie each build to a real environmental problem. Here is how Berkeley County runs it, including the messy parts.
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DISTRICT PROFILE DISTRICT GRADES USING THE KIT FEATURED CLASSROOM PRODUCT KITS IN CIRCULATION WHO DELIVERS IT HOW IT STARTED |
Key takeaways
- Berkeley County's coaches hold the kits and carry them into classrooms, so no individual teacher owns the storage, setup, or troubleshooting.
- The Climate Action Kit works best as the step after basic micro:bit activities, when students have the logic but want more inputs and outputs.
- Real-world framing is what teachers outside computer science value most. Career links and standards connections matter more to them than the hardware.
- Scaffold before you open it up. Logic first, guided builds second, open problems last.
- Plan for parts management and for failed prototypes. Both are normal, and both have simple fixes.
The challenge: students wanted more to build with micro:bit
Berkeley County already taught micro:bits. Students picked up the basics quickly. Buttons, the LED display, if and then. Once they had that down, they were ready for a bigger project.
"In the beginning they do get bored with it," said Bernadette Dewitt, who teaches grade 8 Computer Science Fundamentals. "They're learning how to code with the buttons, and do the heart and the name. And then they just start making sounds with it and interrupting my class all day long."
Philip Sheridan, an innovative learning coordinator for the district, sees the same readiness at every grade level. "Then the Climate Action Kits are great, because now they get more input devices than what is on the micro:bit, and more outputs that are also fun," Sheridan said.
Eighth graders in Berkeley County work through a Climate Action Kit choice board. |
How one teacher got started
Bernadette Dewitt does teach computer science. Her grade 8 Computer Science Fundamentals class counts toward a high school graduation requirement, and she was already teaching micro:bits and code.org before the Climate Action Kit arrived. What she was new to was the kit itself, and she found it the same way any teacher in the district would.
"I learned about the kit when I took a micro:bit class with [our district coaches]," Dewitt said. "I thought about some things that I could do with my students, because I teach the micro:bits to them."
That is the part worth copying. The kit entered her classroom through a district workshop, not through a specialty she already had. Berkeley County runs that kind of session through its own coaching team, the same way many districts use professional development to seed a new tool.
She built the activities herself first, so she knew where students would get stuck. Then she carried the finished builds into other teachers' rooms.
"Some of those teachers were science teachers, math teachers, and they were like, oh, what are you doing?" Dewitt said. "So I'm sparking interest already in the kit for their classes."
For her own class, she built a choice board instead of marching everyone through one activity. "I chose a difficult one all the way down to one that was easy, and the other two were medium," Dewitt said. "Of course, I had a student that went straight to the difficult one, because that's just how he's wired."
Four activities, easy through difficult, so every student starts where they are. |
What students built
Two builds came out on top in Dewitt's student survey. "They really enjoyed the garbage can and the windmill because it was challenging," Dewitt said. "It was easier for them to see what the windmill did and how it worked."
Students went after the code, too. "They enjoyed looking at the code and actually trying to change the code," she said. In the survey, students called it rewarding.
The 3D build model on screen, the real parts in hand. The district said students preferred it over flat, click-through steps. |
Where coding stops being abstract
The strongest part of their approach is not the hardware. It is the habit of pointing students back at their own building.
"I love it when the kids look around the world they live in," Sheridan said. "I say, hey, I just sneezed and I need to sanitize my hands. Where would I go? Oh, over there, it's a hand sanitizer. All right, well, how does this work?"
Then he turns it back to the kit. "I would grab the sonar sensor so it can see a hand. And how would we make the liquid come out? I could use the servo, or the water pump."
For teachers outside computer science, that connection is the draw. "The real world connections and what jobs you could do, that stuff for them I think is more important than the micro:bit itself," said Priscilla Calcutt, also an innovative learning coordinator. Those career and standards connections are usually what gets a lesson onto a busy teacher's plan.
How to sequence it
Do not open with an open-ended challenge. "That's not a good entry point, because they don't know how all of it works," Sheridan said. "They have to scaffold up to that."
The order Berkeley County recommends:
- Teach basic block coding logic, including if and then.
- Run guided kit builds so students learn what each sensor and motor does. The lesson library is where Berkeley County's coaches pull these from.
- Then give students a real problem and a limited set of parts, and let them solve it their own way.
Lessons in Lesson Planning
We asked what did not go well, and Berkeley County told us.
Students did not always know what the parts do. This was the clearest note from the survey. In the safe lighting for sea turtles activity, students reported the LEDs would not light. Nobody had told them to put a hand in front of the sensor. "I think they needed a flyer saying what each piece does," Dewitt said. Ten minutes naming each component fixes it.
Tracking parts takes a system. Painters tape and a check mark flag every kit that has been inventoried, and a box of spare parts means a missing piece never stops a class. For transport, they improvise. "We use Chick-fil-A bags, literally, to carry them," Calcutt said. "Then we just look like we're delivering Chick-fil-A. But we're not. And they're very disappointed."
Prototypes fail, and some students take it hard. "Yes, you can get instant gratification, but you can also get instant failure," Sheridan said. He counts that as a feature. "They have to not get things right always on the first try."
District coaches bring the kits into classrooms and stay to support the lesson. |
The results
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Berkeley County saw positive results on both local formative assessments and state assessment in a targeted fourth grade unit where multiple coaches used the Climate Action Kit as part of integrated technology instruction. The district is clear that the kit was one contributing factor in a unit that integrated several technologies. We are sharing it the way they shared it with us. |
The other sign they watch for is curiosity spreading to parts nobody assigned. "I consistently get kids asking, what's this piece? When are we going to use this?" Sheridan said.
Frequently asked questions
What is a district coaching model for STEM kits?
In a coaching model, the kits are owned and stored centrally by a district instructional technology team rather than by individual classrooms. Coaches book time with teachers, bring the kits in, co-teach or run the lesson, then take the kits back and re-inventory them. Berkeley County runs about 35 Climate Action Kits this way with a team of about seven coaches, covering kindergarten through middle school.
How does a district share Climate Action Kits across many schools?
Berkeley County keeps the kits with its coaching team and rotates them between schools. Two habits make it work: every kit gets inventoried and marked with painters tape and a check mark before it goes back on the shelf, and the team keeps a separate box of spare parts so a single missing piece never stops a class.
Do teachers need coding experience to use the Climate Action Kit?
Not to get started. In Berkeley County, teachers who do not teach technology use the included lesson plans as culminating activities for units they already teach, with district instructional coaches running the lesson alongside them. The featured teacher in this story does teach computer science, and she still learned the kit itself in a district micro:bit workshop.
What grade levels can use the Climate Action Kit?
Berkeley County has used it from kindergarten up through middle school. Younger grades lean on the guided builds and real-world lessons, such as the bee pollinator activity. Older grades move into changing the code and solving open problems.
What is the Climate Action Kit?
The Climate Action Kit is a hands-on coding and building kit from Forward Education. It pairs the micro:bit microcontroller with sensors, motors, and reusable build parts, plus curriculum-aligned lessons that connect each build to a real environmental problem and a real career.
How many kits does a school need?
Berkeley County shares about 35 kits across a district-wide coaching team. A single classroom set is usually one kit per two students. Starting smaller and sharing through a coach is a lower-cost way to test the fit first.
See it in your own classroom
Berkeley County started with one kit and a teacher who was willing to try. If that sounds like your district, we would like to help you take the same first step. You can also read more impact stories from districts running Forward Education kits, or look at grants and funding options if budget is the sticking point.
| Talk to our team about the Climate Action Kit |
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