08/21/2026
Philip Sheridan likes to start his lessons with a question about the room.
"It's lunchtime and I need to sanitize my hands. Where would I go?"
The students point at the dispenser on the wall. "OK, but how does it know my hand is there?"
From there they work it out together. A sonar sensor to notice the hand. A servo or a small pump to move the liquid. The same parts sitting in the kit on their desks.
"I love seeing their minds start looking at what's around them and realizing, oh, I know how that works."
Philip is an innovative learning coordinator at Berkeley County School District in South Carolina. He and his colleagues use the Climate Action Kit with students from kindergarten up.
Their eighth graders built wind turbines, smart garbage cans, and safe lighting for sea turtles. When their teacher surveyed the class afterward, students said the work was rewarding, and that they liked being able to change the code themselves.
We wrote up how they run it, including some of the lessons they learned along the way.
