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Combining Robotics With Poetry? Art and Engineering Can Co-Exist

April 4, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By
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Sue Mellon

By Barbara Ray

At the beginning, people thought she was nuts. Sue Mellon, gifted support coordinator for Springdale Junior and Senior High/Colfax School in the Allegheny Valley School District, thought 7th and 8thgraders could develop a deeper understanding of poetry by playing around with robotics.

“Originally, people looked at me like I was crazy,” Mellon said. Now, two years later, Robotics Poetry is a staple of language arts classes at Springdale and a new grant has students preparing to be peer mentors.

Poetry isn’t always easy for students. But with hands-on engagement, they gain new understanding. Take Robert Frost’s “Pasture.” Instead of just reading and discussing the work in a typical classroom setting, students made 21st-century dioramas with robotic tool kits containing sensors, motors, LEDs, and a controller. One student made a blue plastic wrap lake in an old cardboard photocopy-paper box that vibrated, thanks to the motor, and, lit up, thanks to the LED. When the student said the word “water”—students record themselves reading the poems aloud in the audio-editing program Audacity—the LED turned the plastic wrap a deeper shade of blue. When he got to the bit about the “tottering” calf, the motor made the toy calf vibrate.

“Science, technology, engineering, math, art—that’s all really important. But really, integration is what’s the issue. That’s the critical piece.”

“A lot of kids aren’t crazy about poetry,” Mellon said. “But we have to help them engage with it. After spending two weeks analyzing the poem and creating visual imagery and symbolism for their dioramas, they really understand the work and get quite passionate.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, collaborative learning, design thinking, STEM education

Connected Learning: Tying Student Passions to School Subjects

April 3, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By
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Quest to Learn

By Ashley Williams, Youth Radio

What if your extracurricular activities weren’t just extra but a part of your academics too? New thinking on education intends to bring students’ interests into the classroom. It’s called Connected Learning and promotes the idea that students will excel in school if what they are learning is relevant to their lives, experiences, and passions. This plan is spelled out in a new report, by Mimi Ito, the research director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California Irvine.

While students would still learn core subjects like math and science, Connected Learning provides ways for students to link their classroom lessons to their lives outside the school. Ito says the objective of Connected Learning is to, “meet young people where they are in terms of their peer culture, their interest in popular culture, social media, rather than say you have to meet us where we are as adults.”

“It’s important to diversify the kinds of entry points for the kinds of pathways that young people have.”

Ito uses the Harry Potter Alliance to demonstrate how Connected Learning’s can be effective. She says, “the HPA connects young people who are inspired by the civic virtues portrayed in the Harry Potter books, and want to apply them to the real world.” This fan network organizes over social media platforms (Facebook, Livestream, Youtube, Twitter) to spread awareness and solutions to issues like, equality, and human rights, and to support of charitable causes. Literacy has been a central focus of the group. Their annual book drive has brought 85,000 donations since 2009 and contributions have helped build a library for a charter school in NYC.

Ito says another prime example of Connected Learning is at Youth Radio. The youth-driven media organization channels young peoples’ passions into education and job training. For instance, the poetry group inside Youth Radio, Remix Your Life, helps strengthen students’ writing skills, public speaking  and presentation skills while providing an outlet for us to express what we’re passionate about.

“Meet young people where they are in terms of their peer culture, their interest in popular culture, social media, rather than say you have to meet us where we are as adults.”

Here’s where Connected Learning could help close the opportunity gap. Ito says, “it’s important to diversify the kinds of entry points for the kinds of pathways that young people have.” She adds that “having their interests, their identities validated in the context of academic achievement, civic engagement” is essential to keeping students engaged. This could lead to better student Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, connected learning, design thinking, DML, Mimi Ito, project-based-learning, Quest to Learn

How to Inspire Students to Design, Invent, and Make an Impact

April 2, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By
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Scientist Profile: Inventor

By Almetria Vaba

Spark your students’ curiosity in engineering and technology by introducing them to the designers, inventors, and clever thinkers featured in PBS LearningMedia. Use their stories to illustrate various themes of study like the engineering design process and the impact of technology.

See what happens when a U.S. Paralympic athlete challenges two teams of high school students to build an automated wheelchair. Use this segment to initiate a design challenge in your own classroom. Grades 6-12

How can your students affect the world around them? Use this video segment about wind energy to illustrate the real-world impact of an innovative idea. Grades 6-13+

Get your class excited about great ideas! Introduce them to Ryan Patterson, teen scientist and inventor of an electronic sign language translator glove. Grades 4-6

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, design thinking, PBS LearningMedia, project-based-learning

What Does ‘Design Thinking’ Look Like in School?

March 4, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By
design-thinking

Getty Images

Design thinking can seem a bit abstract to teachers. It’s not part of traditional teacher training programs and has only recently entered the teachers’ vernacular.

Design thinking is an approach to learning that includes considering real-world problems, research, analysis, conceiving original ideas, lots of experimentation, and sometimes building things by hand. But few schools have the time or wherewithal to integrate these processes into the school day.

But at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, Calif., a small, private school for grades K-8, design thinking is part of every class and subject, and has been integrated throughout the curriculum with support from a dedicated Innovation Lab or the iLab.

“It’s really a way to make people more effective and to supercharge their innate capabilities,” said Kim Saxe, director of Nueva’s iLab, and one of the champions of design thinking.

 “Design thinking weaves together a lot of the standards that need to be taught in ways that people will really need to use them.”

At Nueva, students are asked to bring the principles of design to every problem, no matter what age or grade. One fourth-grade design challenge included designing an LED lamp for a family member. Rather than immediately jumping in with ideas about the coolest lamp design, students were told to go home and observe their family members surreptitiously and decide who most needed a new light source. They then had to design a lamp that suited that person’s need and interests.

A sixth grade health-related project required students to work with Kaiser Permanente to improve some of their products. Students interviewed real patients to understand their health experiences and to improve them. “I felt that if they interviewed people with health issues that the kids would Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, design thinking, young entrepreneurs

Video: “The Future Will Not be Multiple Choice”

February 4, 2013 | 9:59 AM | By

Educator Jaime McGrath and designer Drew Davies explain how to create a “classroom of imagination” by turning lessons into design problems and giving students space to be creative in this Tedx video. In a New York Times op-ed The MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition’s co-director Cathy Davidson said she thinks it’s possible that 65 percent of students today will end up doing jobs that haven’t been created yet.

McGrath and Davies argue that school needs to keep up with the times by promoting creativity, entrepreneurship, design thinking and hands on skills. McGrath’s experience teaching design problems has convinced him that the approach includes all learning styles, brings the best of project-based learning, encourages cooperation and integrates subject matter horizontally. But mostly, McGrath and Davies are impressed at the cool stuff kids design.

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, design thinking, project-based-learning, TED talk

Boy Scouts Make Way: Kids Explore By Creating

December 27, 2012 | 8:00 AM | By

Jon Kalish

By Jon Kalish

Countless kids have grown up with the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts or Campfire Girls, but for some families, the uniforms and outdoor focus of traditional Scouting groups don’t appeal.

In recent months, Scout like groups that concentrate on technology and do-it-yourself projects have been sprouting up around the country. They’re coed and, like traditional Scouting organizations, award patches to kids who master skills.

Ace Monster Toys is a hacker space in Oakland, Calif., where members share high-tech tools. Normally, grown-ups congregate there, working on electronics or woodworking projects. But two Sundays a month, the place is overrun by 50 kids and their parents for the gatherings of a group called Hacker Scouts.

The kids in Hacker Scouts are not breaking into computer networks. They make things with their hands, and at this particular meeting they are learning to solder and are building “judobots,” small robots made out of wooden Popsicle sticks.

“It’s old enough where they’re ready to start developing skills, [but] they’re not so old that they’ve already been set in their ways”

On this warm fall day, Alicia Davis, 10, is wearing a wool hat she knit herself. As her dad stands nearby, she sews an LED bracelet with conductive thread.

“I’ve been sewing on little felt pieces with this,” Davis explains. “The battery will power the LEDs and light up. It’s pretty cool.”

Crafting, Computers And The Physical World

Chris Cook, one of the parents active in organizing the Hacker Scouts, serves as president of the hacker space where the Scouts meet. He says the group has expressly targeted kids between the ages of 8 to 14.

“It’s old enough where they’re ready to start developing skills, [but] they’re not so old that they’ve already been set in their ways,” Cook says, “and they’re more interested in what their peer groups are doing.”

“So, we felt it’s the right kind of time to expose them to how to craft with their hands — how to take things from a computer and put them into the physical world,” Cook says. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, design thinking, DIY, tinkering