Wind Map

Wind Map during Hurricane Sandy, October 30, 2012

My friend, Michael Lye, just showed me a live wind map you can access online at http://hint.fm/wind/

The above picture is a saved image of the wind map during Hurricane Sandy.

School is starting soon. This would be something to put up on the screen as students enter the room. Ask them questions like...

What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
What information are you being given?
How do you interact with the map?
How was this map created? What do you think the creators needed to know and be able to do?
When would you most like to look at this map?
If you had created the wind map, how would you have done it differently?
What other data might lend itself to being displayed in a similar way? 

Shelburne Farms Mini Maker Faire

I went to the Maker Faire at Shelburne Farms today for the first time.

This is what I did.

I made a magic wand with an LED light that turns on and off by touching a wire to a battery on the wand. I first had to figure out how to connect the LED to some wires, then run them to the battery correctly. After that part was working, I added sparkly silver ribbon to the stem of the wand and encased the LED light in crumply clear plastic tape for light refraction purposes. Voila! I am ready to put spells on people. Joanna Elliott, Flynn Elementary parent and teacher, was the wizard behind this project. See her fabulous art blog.

I made a puzzle book, a square flexagon (a previously unknown-to-me relative of the hexaflexagon) for comic-book type story-telling, and a mini book that could contain anything from math facts to the secrets of the universe. A matchbook size mini book can be made and then kept in an actual matchbox. Book Arts Guild of Vermont people helped me do this. Students might want to make these after reading the Red Clover Book entitled The Matchbox Diary by Paul Fleischman. This is an activity for any budget.

I spoke with Richa, who is going to assist with a course called Intro to Relational Databases at Girl Develop It Burlington. There are classes and meet-ups. I want to go.

Champlain College Emergent Media Center folks explained what they are working on. Their new Maker Lab that had its grand opening party last night.

I saw a robot-building challenge and presentation by Joe Chase and his team of students from Essex High School. Joe is my neighbor and it was great to see him up there advocating for more design and engineering work in schools. My daughter took his robotics class a few years ago and loved it.

I saw and did many other cool things, including experimenting with magnets with Frank White from CreateItLab and speaking with the effervescent Michael Metz of Generator, Lucy deLaBruere, Courtney Asaro, and Graham Clarke, both of Flynn Elementary School in Burlington.

What a great day! Takeaways included an Arduino Robot Kit made by YourDuino.com and the knowledge that so many people are working on creating engaging opportunities for people of all ages in the Burlington area.

Hit the Target

I was fortunate that my boss found out about a STEM (Science + Technology + Engineering + Math) Coaches course taught by Dr. John Tapper and registered me and our district science coach. We spent four whole days at the Hampton Inn, which is a strange venue for a STEM course but it worked fine. I gained about 5 pounds because the hotel served muffins every morning and cookies every afternoon and I ate them.

I already knew John Tapper from afar because of his excellent book on math instruction called Solving for Why. This course wasn’t about math menus and differentiation; instead John got us thinking about teaching STEM and instructional coaching. There was lots of discussion, not lots of lecturing, and plenty of hands-on investigations involving buoyancy, force, and motion. John teaches college level math and education courses, but has experience as an elementary classroom teacher, administrator, instructional coach and researcher. I found his perspective refreshing and some of his ideas about STEM new to me.

I’d been wondering how to best integrate math with other content areas. In the STEM Coaches course, John pushed us to use math in a meaningful way rather than as an add-on. He asked, “What about challenging students to create a mathematical model that they will then use to make a prediction?”

It turns out there are fun, engaging ways to do just that. John gave us Straw Rocket Launchers (go here if you want plans to make your own). Two teams experimented with these, adjusting the launch angle and launch force to see how to get the straw to travel different distances. When each team felt they had enough data, John placed a hotel napkin on the sidewalk. “It must hit this target!” Teams measured the distance to the target, then decided how to set the angle and force of the launcher. No more practice runs - each team had one chance to get it right. See photos below of classmates crunching the numbers, then trying to hit the square.

There were a few different targets. Both teams were able to hit the napkin, but the small soup cup John put out was too tough.

It helped to experience these challenges as a learner. Everyone was engaged in the task and we had to really use the math and rely on it to be successful. A key point: hitting a target at a given (initially unknown) distance is very different than simply sending a rocket as far as it can go. The math ended up being the centerpiece of the activity, and the whole thing was really FUN.

We also tried to determine the minimum surface area for an effective parachute, create our own timer (pendulums, a hole in a water bottle), and decide how to predict if a given object would sink or float.

I have a new sense of how to use all four letters in STEM in a meaningful way, and how to give students greater ownership of their learning.

We should all try to hit the target!

Connie Knodt and Grit

My friend Suzy texted me last week to tell me she was listening to a wonderful piece on NPR’s TED Radio Hour about “grit”. Here’s the link to the story, entitled Is Having Grit the Key to Success?
The concept of grit or perseverance keeps coming up in my work, because the first math practice standard in the Common Core is “Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them”...and, more importantly, because teachers and parents know that determination and the ability to cope with failure is paramount to student success.
Last night I had the pleasure of speaking with Connie Knodt, a relatively new member of my family. She was featured recently on WCAX’s Super Senior series. Connie is 79 years old and still works 28 hours a week at Fletcher Allen Hospital in the pediatric ward. Here’s the link to her story. Connie and I had a great conversation about how she was able to transcend a difficult childhood to become an IBM engineer when few women did such a thing. I asked if she could remember anyone who was an important role model for her when she was young. Without hesitating, she told me about two top-notch high school teachers who inspired her to become to lifelong learner she is today. She remembered their names and talked in detail about how her geometry teacher asked the students to build structures rather than assigning pages in a textbook.
Connie’s story reminds us that teachers are so important. One great teacher can turn a life around.
Connie is also a living testament to grit. She’s interested in solving tough problems and never being finished with her own learning. She told me that at work if there’s a new computer system, medical device, or scheduling conundrum, they bring it to her. She’s happy to take on the challenge.

Hour of Code Video

This was so much fun!

Machines to Materials

I just watched two PBS NOVA shows that I must share. One is called Making Stuff: Smaller. The other is Making Stuff: Stronger. There are other Making Stuff shows I haven’t watched yet.

Check these out! You can watch them for free online (at least right now you can).

As an educator and a parent, these videos get me all fired up. Young people should be learning about cutting edge science and math, not just the stuff of textbooks and standards. I want to show these to students and then I’d expect to hear them talking about wanting to be a chemist, material scientist, or nanotechnologist when they grow up.

My favorite part of Making Stuff: Smaller was the concept of starting by using a machine to complete a task, and then evolving to using a material to accomplish the same task. This is a key feature of miniaturization, which is what allows us to have laptops and cellphones, among other things, today. Computer processing went from giant rooms of vacuum tubes to silicon chips, but the story I liked the most was the journey from behemoth pendulum clocks to quartz watches. If this makes no sense to you, watch the video.

Another awesome story in Making Stuff: Smaller is about driving a tiny robot around inside someone’s eyeball to deliver medicine. Holy cow!

Sand Castle Summer

Look what I just found on Math Munch: Cool, geometric sand castles made by Calvin Seibert. What will you create on the beach this summer?

St. Louis STEM Reader

I attended the NSTA STEM Conference in St. Louis last week with several colleagues. It was a very worthwhile trip.

Top Quotes

“Engineering naturally integrates mathematics, science, social studies and language literacy.” - Tamara Moore

“Tell kids they are doing engineering. Use that word. Students, especially girls, tend to go to medical school or major in science in college if they enjoy STEM. Very few choose engineering because they don't know what that means.” - Liz Parry

“If you are not iterating, it is not engineering.” - Ann McMahon

“Is it really STEM or is it just John Dewey?” - Tara Bell

Top Takeaways

1. High-quality STEM education is more about the how than the what. We can’t teach students everything they will need to know. We can help them learn how to learn.

2. The habits of mind related to engineering can be a thread running through all content areas. Empathy, collaboration, failure, iteration, perseverance, social justice, activism, leadership.

3. STEM has the potential to make a real difference for equity and diversity. It has been shown to be an effective way to engage struggling or at risk students. Currently, success in STEM subjects in school and in careers is very skewed toward certain demographic groups, and something needs to be done to change that.

Favorite Presenters

Tara Bell, STEM coach at Washington STEM Academy in Champaign, IL

Bob Goodman (New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning: Ridgewood, NJ) Demystifying Science with the Progressive Science Initiative (PSI) Equity requires that all high school students learn physics, chemistry, and biology. PSI is a free open-source program that is helping schools achieve that goal.

Liz Parry, Coordinator, STEM Partnership Development, The Engineering Place, College of Engineering, NC State University

Ann P. McMahon Ex-Aerospace engineer. Strategies for integrating STEM with social and emotional learning. Ann recently gave a TEDx talked titled Engineering Empathy (use password tedxgladstone).

Beth Bender, Principal of Gateway STEM High School, St. Louis. A public magnet school, 85% FRL, 55% African american, increasing ELL. There is a lack of awareness about engineering, and it is mostly male. Engineering students give demonstrations for other students during lunch; recruiting for the high school is done with hands-on tasks, live puppies.

Tamara Moore, University of Minnesota. STEM Education Center. Said she would soon be running a pilot program of K-6 STEM integrated units that include a heavy children’s literature component.

Resources

Family Engineering (book and website recommended by Liz Parry)

TeachEngineering

Ideo and the Design Thinking for Educators toolkit

New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning

eGFI

Gateway STEM High School

The Deep Dive

EnLIST Entrepreneurial Leadership in STEM Teaching and Learning

University of Minnesota STEM Education Center

TryEngineering

National Center for Universal Design on Learning

Sugata Mitra: School in the Cloud

Sugata Mitra recently won the TED Prize for 2013. His wish is to build a virtual school where children learn from each other.

Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or should they not? At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent." And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? (Laughter) What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was. - Sugata Mitra

Salt + Fat

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food by Michael Moss, Published Feb. 20, 2013 in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

I enjoyed this article in last weekend’s New York Times. In it, you will find important information about the workings of the food industry and will have a better understanding of the obesity epidemic. Also, I couldn’t help but notice how mathematics is such an important part of the story. When you get to the part about the food guru Howard Moskowitz, (“I’ve optimized soups, I’ve optimized pizzas. I’ve optimized salad dressings and pickles. In this field, I’m a game changer.”) notice his ability to use statistical analysis to take bucketfuls of taste test data and turn it into usable information. This is why he has become a legend in his field.

Learning to code

http://www.code.org/

Watch this video. I completely agree that learning to code is learning to think. I think it is getting easier to teach, too, because there are lots of resources like Scratch and the Lego Mindstorms, plus tons of other links on the code.org. We are running out of time and excuses when it comes to our kids.

Lego Robotics

I had an incredible day with students. As part of the Flynn Elementary School Inquiry Fair, I teamed up with Amy Truchon and Nina Madore to offer a workshop on Lego Robotics. We’d borrowed 8 brand new kits from Professor Tim Whiteford of Saint Michael’s College, opened the boxes and played around with them just recently.

We used both Lego WEDO and Lego Mindstorms kits. I had only taken them out of the box and dabbled a teeny bit, so I was experimenting along with the students. Kids built alligators that chomp your finger if you move it close enough, kicking soccer players and goalies, tweeting birds, and more. My afternoon Mindstorms duo programmed a car to drive until it got close to a wall or other obstacle, stop, back up, change direction, make a fiendish laughing sound, then start driving again.

Students didn’t want to leave at the end of the workshop to go to lunch or home. They were having too much fun. I highly recommend these for school or home. In the end, what they are learning is software and hardware engineering, a very relevant set of skills in these times.