STEM Service Learning: Homeschoolers Gain Collaborative Skills

For seven years now I've taught at a homeschool co-op while my own kids attend public school, and I attended parochial school for 12 years, so I feel like I've gotten a front-row seat to the best of all worlds. I've heard endless debates about which mode of education is best, with lots of stereotypes and suspicion thrown around. My take? There are excellent aspects to each, and each has its own drawbacks. I'd rather skip the esoteric arguments and move right to being part of a solution. If that sounds OK to you, keep reading. If not, go on and post on a debate website somewhere.

My passion is STEM (science technology engineering and math) education. Key elements of STEM ed include group collaborative skills, innovation, and stem concepts through project-based learning. What better place for homeschoolers, who are traditionally more independent learners, to gain experience than at a co-op with other same-aged students?

Last year my 9th and 10th grade Introduction to Engineering students filtered water, built tiny cantilevers, played with polymers and crafted a Wright Flyer out of recyclables. This year many of those same students are in Engineering 2 and we're starting a new effort. It's called service learning, and it's been on my brain ever since I stumbled upon the National Service Learning Partnership's website .

We're embarking on a 20-24 week project (we're 3 weeks in now) called Capstone. In the Capstone projects, teams of three, four or five students will practice service learning and the design cycle. Service learning is a model where educational concepts and teamwork are put to use in projects for the good of the local community. Service learning can happen in any subject - an example would be creating "reading buddies" where older students practice reading skills by working with younger kids.

In the STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) world service learning can happen by student teams designing computer models for churches, inventing products for animal shelters to make their work easier, creating computer applications to help senior citizens, and many other possibilities. Some of these very ideas were proposed last week by student groups.

Some service learning models are student-led, and this is what I'm striving for. Our four class group leaders volunteered for the leads and are doing an admirable job so far. After assembling teams and brainstorming ideas, teams presented their select ideas for feedback. Criteria for Capstone Project approval include meeting an actual need, having a community partner, teacher approval, and of a scope and level of effort to fit well inside a 20-24 week process.

If you are in the Charlottesville, Virginia area, work with a non-profit or community group that has a project, and are willing to partner with some awesome high-school engineering students, drop me a line! Also, if you are interested in supporting our efforts with a donation, that would be much appreciated and would help offset materials costs.

I'll post updates throughout the year on what we cook up.

The Wright Stuff

Image credit: Jm@n Google 3-D warehouse 2011

What can you do with 200 square feet of corrugated cardboard, 100 feet of cardboard rollers, yards of yarn and Makedo connectors? If you add in over 20 students and 5 hours in the hot sun, you get a half-scale model of the Wright Flyer.


Why? Why would we do such a thing? I'm slightly crazy and the awesome students were actually really happy to do it. We finished up our Intro to Engineering course for the year with a four-week unit on the STEM concepts of recycling - where do plastic bottles, diapers, cardboard and glass come from, and where do they go when we throw them away. To "tangify" the lessons (I'm totally coining that word, meaning to make tangible) we did mini-challenges with Makedo and then brainstormed a LARGE group build using only recyclable materials.

In order to practice the design cycle, smaller student teams imagined projects and pitched them to everyone. Students voted and the winning project was to model the Wright Brothers' first flying machine, the 1903 Wright Flyer.
Working off of a Google SketchUp model of the Flyer (credit: J-m@n) from the 3-D warehouse, we shrunk it to half size and printed multiple views with dimensions. Students brought boxes, tubes, plastic bags and old yard, lots of it.


Although our ultimate goal of constructing such a solid Flyer that we could actually launch it failed, we did manage to put together over 75% of the very complicated airplane. I think each of us knows a ton more about Orville and Wilbur's ingenious design and how to work together on a project. We ran into the same issues that every project has: time overruns, material shortages, weather factors - but there's nothing better than practice to learn how to deal with these in a productive manner and keep progressing to a goal. Excellent work, students - you really did something special.

Use Less by Makedo-ing More, Part 2

Student-made Makedo windmill using plastic cups, styrofoam and connectors - video below

We're continuing to study STEM recycling concepts using Makedo as an activity focus. Last week we studied the life cycle of cardboard and made Makedo creations with reusables, this week we covered glass and made more Makedo-dles.

Teaching this class is like playing one big game of Balderdash. If I had to guess what words like "cullet" and "vitrification" meant I would have guessed, in order, a fish and a wine process. No points for me - want to take a try yourself, just pause before reading on...

Glass is one example of an amorphous solid, which is just a fancypants way of saying it doesn't have structure like a crystal. Glass' primary raw material is sand, or silica (SiO2) which is heated and combined with additives to make different types of glass. (I can't help sharing that when lighting strikes sand the intense heat instantaneously forms lightning glass, or fulgurite - it's like petrified lightning!)

Just like water, when glass turns from a solid into a liquid through heat it's called melting. But glass gets its own awesome word, "vitrification", for the change from liquid back to solid glass. Really, at room temperature glass is as frozen as we would be at -50 Celsius. Next time you look through a pane of glass or at a bottle, see a frozen completely reusable liquid!

Glass can withstand this change back and forth from liquid to solid an unending amount of times, which is why it's so good to recycle. So "cullet" is not a bottom-feeding fish, it's crushed glass that's ready to recycle by adding more raw materials and reheating.

My students' earth-friendly activity was to use Makedo to design an object with recyclable parts that moved on their own in the wind. We ran out of time for all groups to complete a working model, but there was one notable success:

excellent work, Zach and teammates!

If you want to learn more, check out the following links:

Video for how glass is recycled
http://earth911.com/recycling/glass/video-how-glass-gets-recycled/

Listing of everything that is recyclable in the city of Charlottesville, VA
http://www.charlottesville.org/Index.aspx?page=566

Household hazardous waste disposal guide locally
http://rswa.avenue.org/household.htm

Corning Museum of Art's website with tons of fun pictures and explanations:
http://www.cmog.org/dynamic.aspx?id=11886

F2NFVAAD857J

Failure does hurt. It just isn't the end.

Hello students and blog readers - I'm going to write something here, and it's tough but I especially want my students to know that I really mean what I say. Blog readers, you can listen in on the conversation but this is primarily written to my students. I tell them all the time that failure can be the best thing because you can learn so much. I cheer when they put tons of effort into a model that doesn't work, since then they pick up and try again. I remember things the most when they have thwarted me over and over before I get it.

Students, our team was just turned down for the next step in the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams grant cycle. We spent dozens of hours of creative and thoughtful work to document our potential invention and plan, and I have the highest respect for the teams ultimately chosen by MIT. Students, I am so proud of you, you have come so far in just one year. I'm sure we'll still try to prototype our invention through other funding or grants.

This is the real world - yes, I'm fantastically disappointed but also not crushed - if I add up all the times I "succeed" versus "fail" I'm sure the fails would far outpace the wins. I writing this so you know that how we handle the losses is so key, so clutch - and when it comes down to it even though I'm your teacher I'm still learning, just like you.

Here's to you - great work, and I'm looking forward to next year's application.

InvenTeams or Bust

Our group has an application in for a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams grant and we'll find out May 6 if we win! We submitted our multi multi part proposal April 22nd for this extremely cool program run through a partnership between the Lemelson Foundation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Too excited to wait. Even if we don't get it it's been an awesome learning experience and a chance to give students a leadership and brainstorming role - we had to document a potential invention - and we'll try again next year! I'll keep everyone posted!

Use Less by Makedo-ing More

Photo credit http://makedo.com.au/creatures/ retrieved 4/27/11, © Makedo and Paul Justin

We're now starting a multi-part unit on green engineering and STEM concepts that is similar to the Sugru challenge (see posts from Febr.). We've got eco-things to learn and a large-scale project to design, all tied into the science and technology surrounding the environment. Now, before your eyes begin to glaze over at the thought of an environmental lecture and guilt-trip into recycling, give me just a minute. I am just like anyone out there. I recycle when it's convenient, try to reuse things, watch what I throw down the drain but definitely could do a better job of being eco-friendly.

What I find over and over again with my students, though, is that inspiring them to take hold of concepts through fun activities is much more effective than trying to grind subject matter into them. I'm taking a cue from them right now as I've recently been very moved to think differently about the materials I use and then discard. Learning doesn't always have to taste like fish oil. Sometimes it can taste like popcorn.

Our new partner in this effort is the awesome Australian company Makedo. Makedo describes themselves as "inspiring social change through playful creativity". They make a set of universal connectors and hinges that can transform a pile of paper into a toy, bird or a car (my own kids love their gallery of creations). Makedo is especially fond of cool designs and collaboration. We've got enough of their universal connectors and tools for all thirty engineering students and any others who are interested in making something BIG and FUN out of materials that would otherwise have been thrown away.

Makedo and STEM concepts came together in yesterday's lesson:

Students learned facts about the size and scale of human trash production, like how humans generate more than four pounds per person per day. We also ran through the complete life cycle of cardboard: beginning with fast-growing pine trees trunks, wood pulp is shredded, "digested" by sodium hydroxide to break up wood fibers and then pressed, rolled and dried into sheets or shapes. Once used, cardboard can be stuck back into digesters with fresh wood pulp and reused (as long as it doesn't have plastic coating on it). We named and discussed local recyclers like Van der Linde that offer single-stream recycling.

Finally, they practiced the design cycle using Makedo connectors and reusable materials from my home, which were cardboard, plastic bottles, caps and grocery paper bags. Their goal was to make a pet or creature in only 15 minutes using only Makedo and the recyclables.



If you want to explore more, see these links:

Common recycling facts
http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html

How corrugated cardboard is made
http://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Corrugated-Cardboard.html

Recycling cardboard
http://cardboardrecycling.org/

Biomedical Engineering: more than just Frankenfruit

Image credit: Return of the Jedi: © & TM Lucas Film. LTD

How can a debate of the relative strengths between Chewbacca and Yoda help students learn?

Ask David Chen, faculty member at the University of Virginia Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME). David was our third guest speaker for the year and brought stories, descriptions of current research, and some fun to our class. He heads UVa's partnership with the Coulter Foundation to support translational research (making scientific discoveries and bringing them into real-world situations). As I've mentioned before, lack of knowledge of current careers and research in engineering is often a barrier to choosing to study engineering. In his engaging way, David helped take down a few more barriers for this group of students.

David started off by dividing class into two teams. Each team had to pick and defend a superhero with uncommon strength, skill or special powers. One team picked Yoda, the other, a hundred Chewbaccas. Who would win if they fought? Why? What are some traits that are biologically different? Could you combine genes to make a Yobacca, or Chewyoda? Would it be right to do so? After the laughter died down from picturing Yoda using the force on a giant circle of Wookies (I know they're on the same side, silly) David drew parallels between the discussion and modern biomedical engineering.

He described a field that bridges medicine, biology, materials science and engineering, a field where you quite possibly could take desirable properties of one element and combine them with another.

A BME might listen to a surgeon describing a need for a surgical tool. A BME could understand the problem, then apply his or her knowledge of biology and design to create and test a new medical technology.

BME's also grow skin cells and tissue for grafts, study ways to improve prosthetics, or generate strains of crops that are drought resistant or have special properties (example: frankenfruit).

Biomedical engineering is filled with ethical debates on stem cell use, genetically modified foods and cloning. David helpfully told us that the embryonic stem cell debate is lessening because there are alternate, ethically preferable sources of stem cells coming into use from adults or umbilical cord blood.

Bio-medical engineering is an excellent example of a cross-disciplinary career that is changing and developing quickly due to its young age. Thanks again to David Chen.

Check out these links for further exploration.

Homepage of the University of Virginia Biomedical Engineering Department. There are easy to find tabs for people, research, news, and contact information. Look at what they are studying in tissues, imaging or cardiovascular engineering.
http://www.bme.virginia.edu/

Frequently Asked Questions about biomedical engineering from the Biomedical Engineering Society. This page has a nice summary of specialty areas within Biomedical Engineering including bioinstrumentation, biomaterials, biomechanics, rehabilitation engineering, medical imaging and systems physiology.
http://www.bmes.org/aws/BMES/pt/sp/be_faqs

If the conversations about ethics in biomedical engineering interested you, you might want to browse the National Society of Professional Engineer's Code of Ethics. Just as doctors must "first, do no harm", professional engineers must "hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public.
http://www.onlineethics.org/Resources/ethcodes/EnglishCodes/9972.aspx