Vermont Fest 2014 and a Snake

The sign of a good conference is when you come away from it questioning everything about your work.

I like this snake drawing from the New York Public Library more than the three terrible photos I took of people in banquet rooms at the Killington Grand. I would never consider publishing a blog post without a picture.

At Vermont Fest this year, I found myself wanting to make a list of a bunch of things all students should get the chance to do in school.

Skype/hangout/video interact with people in other parts of the world

Type an equal sign into a spreadsheet

Make a personalized, LED-lit badge to explore how light works

Have maker/genius/whatever hour/day/week to explore something interesting to them

Publish their content (writing/photos/videos) on a blog and comment on the work of others

Learn about how computers work by writing some code

Be asked the questions How are you feeling? What do you think? and What do you need?

Use Google Research Tools to find and cite things.

Sit in chairs listening to a teacher talk a lot less.

Some great presenters I encountered include Chris Lehmann (@chrislehmann), Bonnie Birdsall (@bonniebird), Dan French (@danfrench), Adam Provost (@batman44), Lucie deLaBruere (@techsavvygirl), Charlie Macfadyen (@csmacf), Tricia Hinkle (@VTScienceFair), Matt Dunne (@@mattdunnevt). Check them out.

Here are a couple of links.

Using Google Sheets in the Classroom

Tricia Hinkle’s site

Bonnie Birdsall’s writing tech site

The Vermont Fest site with all kinds of other links to presenters

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.

B Positive

B Positive is my blood type, and it has served as an important reminder about my attitude toward all things work-related (and non work-related).

I attended Dynamic Landscapes last week at Champlain College and had a wonderful time. The best presenters are those who are super enthusiastic about education and its potential. Though cynical about the way things are, wonderful speakers like Gary Stager, Thursday’s keynote, has an optimistic vision.

Gary says...

I am not surprised when kids do extraordinary things. I am surprised when adults are surprised when kids do extraordinary things.

What are kids really capable of? We need to find out.

Gary Stager is worth getting to know if you are an educator. He’s an advocate for kids working to their fullest potential with technology, and having high/low tech maker spaces in classrooms. His book is called Invent to Learn. Gary makes me want to be more radical.

At Dynamic Landscapes, I also attended a panel of educators who recently hosted the Smarter Balanced Assessment (Common Core) field test in their schools, facilitated by Peter Drescher of the Vermont Agency of Education. My district isn’t part of the field test, so it was great to hear from folks who know more. There was discussion of the nuts and bolts of the new assessment like the fact that students could take the test on a tablet but are supposed to have an external keyboard. There was talk of how to schedule the test to make it work, how to test the wireless capacity of the schools, how to prepare students and teachers.

I noticed that many of the educators who have administered the Smarter Balanced field test to students remarked that students enjoyed it. They like the tech format rather than dealing with pencil and paper, they liked the multimedia content, and the challenging questions.

A principal in the audience spoke up. I didn’t know him and didn’t catch his name. He said attitude is everything. This is a positive opportunity to learn. Let’s pull our sleeves up and make this work. There will be challenges, but we will learn a lot. Like any new thing there will be bumps in the road. His positive attitude was adopted by his staff and students.  

There is and will be lots of complaining about the Smarter Balanced assessments. Adult negativity is quickly taken up by students, and could rob them of important opportunities. As a math coach, I will model positivism.

B Positive.

Organizing Information

New York Public Library

Max Ray’s talk at NCSM was about a math lesson he taught twice. The first time things didn’t go as well as he’d hoped. Max had the opportunity to reflect with his collaborators afterward. Luckily, they were going to teach the same lesson again to another group of students the same day. They decided what they wanted to do differently based on the results from the first group.

Here is the excellent write-up of that lesson by Max. The second go at the lesson is one in which the teachers respond to students who need support by modeling an organizational strategy. They actively avoid giving students hints about how they might mathematize the problem situation they’ve been given. It is no surprise that Max has done a nice job organizing the student-teacher-student volley into tables in his article. The outcomes in the second lesson are superior.

The ability to organize information is an important skill. When I observe students engaging in math problem-solving, often their success hinges on if and how they organize their work. Organizing information is also the key to great writing, troubleshooting, designing websites and databases, waiting tables, using spreadsheets, teaching, talking, and many other things. Here is Rob Lamb’s Collaborative Infographics for Science Literacy site, which also relates.

If you are a teacher, test it. See how students respond if you honor their ideas and teach only organizational strategies.

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!

What Google has learned about hiring

A few days ago, the New York Times published an interview by Adam Bryant entitled “In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal”. Bryant interviewed Lazslo Bock, a Google executive, about what Google has learned about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to hiring new employees.

Google has the resources to crunch numbers on employee performance or success and match that to hiring criteria. Most of the rest of us don’t, so this is worth reading. Here are a few things that stood out for me, as someone who participates on hiring committees and tends to wonder how good I am at judging applicants.

“Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.”

“On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time...What works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up...[also] where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.”

“Twice a year, anybody who has a manager is surveyed on the manager’s qualities...We then share that with the manager, and we track improvement across the whole company. Over the last three years, we’ve significantly improved the quality of people management at Google, measured by how happy people are with their managers...for most [managers], just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct.”

Lastly, this is my favorite bit from the article:

“...G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless...We found that they don’t predict anything...the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time...academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are...conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer...You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”

These insights have far-reaching implications for teachers, not just members of hiring committees.

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

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.

Ada Lovelace

It is always good to hear about female mathematicians. Today, Google featured a graphic with the tag “Ada Lovelace’s 197th birthday”. Investigation revealed that Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the poet, Lord Byron, and lived in the 1800s.

A paragraph in the Washington Post caught my attention.

At the age of 17, Lovelace was among the first to grasp the importance of Babbage’s machines, Google noted. In her correspondence, as reported by New Scientist magazine, Lovelace said that “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” She also noted that the Analytical Engine “does not occupy common ground with mere calculating machines” and had the potential to run complicated programs of its own.

Apparently, Lovelace wrote the first algorithm designed to be run by the Analytical Engine. Some say she should be considered the first computer programmer.

Here is another Lovelace quote to ponder (from Wikipedia:Ada Lovelace)

[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...

Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.[58]

Is Welding a STEM job?

New York Public Library Digital Gallery

Victor Prussack, Burlington’s Coordinator of Magnet Schools, found this Thomas Friedman article in the New York Times over the weekend and was kind enough to send it to me.

The piece begins with a profile of a sheet metal business owner from Minnesota named Traci Tapani. She can’t find enough skilled welders.

“Many years ago, people learned to weld in a high school shop class or in a family business or farm, and they came up through the ranks and capped out at a certain skill level. They did not know the science behind welding,” so could not meet the new standards of the U.S. military and aerospace industry.

“They could make beautiful welds,” she said, “but they did not understand metallurgy, modern cleaning and brushing techniques” and how different metals and gases, pressures and temperatures had to be combined.

Welding “is a $20-an-hour job with health care, paid vacations and full benefits,” said Tapani, but “you have to have science and math. I can’t think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it’s bent to a certain angle.”

Who knew? Welding is now a STEM job — that is, a job that requires knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math.

I was reading this article to my kids tonight and it occurred to me that even today’s doctors and lawyers - always regarded as professions for the highly educated - have undergone a STEM transplant. Doctors of today have unprecedented levels of information access and global collaboration, and are using online medical records, sophisticated medical imaging technology, gene therapies, remote robotic surgery, and more. Lawyers might have to deal with things that didn’t exist not long ago like various forms of DNA and IT evidence.

If you wanted to be an administrative assistant or a librarian, you used to be able to use a Rolodex and the card catalog. Now these jobs are all about technology.

New York Public Library Digital Gallery

Music for the Eyes

Joe Garofalo, C.P. Smith music teacher and captain in the Lyric Theater’s recent production of Titanic, kindly shares his room with me. Often, before the students arrive in the morning, we find ourselves discussing the math-music connection and how we might help bring this to life for students. Last week, Joe showed me some animated music he’d discovered. I had a hard time tearing myself away. See for yourself. Here is Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor  by a company called Musanim. Musanim says it will send a free DVD of these videos to public libraries and schools. We’ve got ours on order.

Scale of the Universe

 

What do Gomez’s Hamburger, Palm Jebel Ali and Mimivirus have in common? They are all found in Scale of the Universe 2 at 2.5 x 1015 meters, 8 x 103 meters, and 4 x 10-7meters, respectively. Scale of the Universe 2 is a cool, interactive website which goes nicely with my earlier blog post about the Powers of Ten lesson and video. Visitors can zoom all the way down to teeny Quantum Foam and then all the way out to the observable universe and the Hubble Deep Field.

Each object has a brief description, so you will not be left wondering what Palm Jebel Ali is (the largest human-made island) and you’ll know Gomez’s Hamburger is a heavenly body, not a menu item. There are commonplace entries like a Boeing 747 and a sunflower, too.

Students can use this site to explore relative magnitude even if they are not yet ready to learn about exponents in math. Author Istvan Banyai has written a wonderful book called Zoom, which does something similar in low-tech. Students might try to create their own book in this format.

John J. Flynn library super-star Corey Wallace brought Scale of the Universe to my attention. This is just another example of how my own universe is constantly expanding with the help of my talented and enthusiastic colleagues.