By Lynn Petrinjak
Posted on 2015-05-12
A student at Preston Middle School in Fort Collins, Colorado, holds up a prototype rechargeable lantern for inspection by collaborating students at the CHAT House in Uganda via Skype. Photo courtesy of Heidi Hood
It’s an international effort that may be unique: Students in the United States and Canada are working together to design 3D–printed, portable, battery-powered, rechargeable lanterns that students in Uganda and the Dominican Republic, who do not have reliable access to electricity, will field test. This isn’t an act of charity, it’s a “global collaboration to use kids’ unique talents and technology to make the world a better place,” says Tracey Winey, media specialist at Preston Middle School in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“The premise of the program is everybody has different talents,” she continues. “It’s not one group serving another. Each [group] is contributing unique talents to make a successful program. We have laid a foundation that everybody’s voice is important.”
The groups include students at Preston Middle School; Riverview High School in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada; the Care and Hope through Adoption and Technology (CHAT) House in Uganda; the Dominican Republic; and Pheasey Park Farm Primary School and Children’s Centre in Walsall, United Kingdom.
At Preston Middle School, students in the One Million Lights Club visit Winey’s media center before and after school and during lunch to work on the project. Along with Winey and John Howe, the school’s vice principal, they have Skyped with CHAT House students to learn more about their particular needs for the portable lights and shared their designs with the Riverview students. The CHAT House students also will field test the lights designed and built in Colorado. Winey says the CHAT House students will check the circuits to make sure they work and track how long the lights last, how many cranks are needed to charge the battery for how many minutes of light, whether the light is strong enough, how long batteries must be plugged into solar panels to be fully charged, and more. Their feedback will help the Preston students improve their designs.
“One byproduct [of the project] is light, but another is to foster global collaboration…[while] creating philanthropy in our kids,” explains Winey. “Our kids learn so much content through this program. This isn’t a class; my kids come before school, after school. Kids are motivated because they are curious and they know their work matters.”
And it does. While speaking with the CHAT House students, Winey’s students learned they wanted handheld lights so they would be able to identify predatory animals and other threats when they left the main CHAT House building to visit outhouses during the night. Her students also learned that while CHAT House has a generator for reliable light inside the orphanage, most of the surrounding village does not, which could lead to resentment. Sharing rechargeable lights with their neighbors would help build a stronger sense of community.
At Riverview High School, science teacher Ian Fogarty shares the story of Maria and Hailey with his students. In August 2014, one of his students met the two girls in the Dominican Republic. They both dream of becoming doctors, but struggle to study after dark when their home only has electricity a few nights a week.
“Engineering seems to be a nice mix of purposeful science,” Fogarty says. Instead of getting “lost in our science lab,” he adds, philanthropic engineering projects provide concrete answers to why students learn about circuits. “Now they are learning to help somebody. I tell them, ‘Here’s their story, here’s how we can help.’ It gives content real-life purpose…The motivation is ‘We’re going to learn this to help somebody; if we don’t learn, someone is going to suffer.’ There is no middle ground; either it works or it doesn’t.”
Fogarty was able to add the light project to his existing curriculum. “It wasn’t a big change in the classroom. It was a change of focus. We can do the same tests as before,” he explains. His ninth-grade students do the same circuitry labs as in previous years, but do them with Maria and Hailey in mind. In his 10th-grade Broad Based Technology course, students use Google SketchUp to draw cases for the flashlights, while 11th- and 12th-grade physics students go into greater depths working with electronics and microprocessors. The Science 12 class, which “blends the borders [among] science, humanities, and language arts,” also examines the role of the local culture, investigating how they will get the lights to Maria and Hailey (and other students in similar situations), he relates.
“Engineering is the last gender gap, I think,” remarks Fogarty. “In this project, eight out of 12 students are girls. Three [female] students not in class are checking in weekly. They tell me, ‘We’re invested in it now. We want to see it through.’ One of the goals is gender equity in science moving forward; this seems to be helping that out quite a bit.”
The Fort Collins and Moncton students shared their designs with one another electronically. Winey explains the Moncton students knew more about circuitry than her middle school students did, and her students had more experience in virtual collaboration and 3D printing. In addition to collaborating on circuitry with Winey’s students in Colorado, Fogarty’s students worked across the Atlantic Ocean with Gareth Hancox’s fourth-grade students at Pheasey Park Farm Primary.
“My students taught those students about circuits and sent them a design task [to create] cases. Each kid spent five [to] eight hours of [his or her] own time designing lights. They pitched their designs to us and really challenged what my high school kids were thinking…They’ve helped us with brainstorming design,” says Fogarty. The elementary students’ designs included glow-in-the-dark cases, dimmer switches, and options to make the lights wearable.
Hancox notes this “revolutionary approach to learning…between elementary and high school students on different continents has been a giant leap forward in learning. Both sets of students had interesting, sensible, and exciting ideas on how best to approach the problem of supplying light to students in the Dominican Republic. What happened next was true collaboration; the younger students presented their designs over a Skype video presentation with immediate feedback from Canada. Ideas however ‘out of the box’ were discussed, and certain elements were further developed until a final design was agreed upon by all the students.” He adds that it has been incredibly important for his students “to work on a real project with definitive outcomes that will change the lives of others.”
Fogarty and Winey also tapped into resources in their local communities. He has had an engineer “loaned” from a technology company check that the students were designing with safety in mind, and a university professor visit while students worked on circuit boards. Volunteers from Intel worked with Winey’s students on soldering, and the school’s computer science and electronics teacher checked students’ circuits. “The beauty of it is that people who want to come, come. It’s truly motivated by people…serving for the sake of serving,” Winey says.
UNESCO has declared 2015 the Year of Light to raise awareness about light-based technologies and how they can be used to promote sustainable development and resolve energy, education, agriculture, and health challenges. Winey and Fogarty hope more educators will be inspired to make philanthropic engineering part of their curriculum.
With Howe, they launched a website, www.philanthropic-engineering.org, to share how they have made creating reliable light sources for others central to their students’ learning experiences. Fogarty hopes to eventually add more philanthropic engineering materials—such as designs for an automated greenhouse a group of his students have been working on to support a community garden—to the site.
This article originally appeared in the May 2015 issue of NSTA Reports, the member newspaper of the National Science Teachers Association. Each month, NSTA members receive NSTA Reports featuring news on science education, the association, and more. Not a member? Learn how NSTA can help you become the best science teacher you can be.
The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.
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By Lauren Jonas, NSTA Assistant Executive Director
Posted on 2015-05-11
Stability and change; gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data; and science for all—these are the themes of the April/May 2015 journal articles from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). Browse through the thought-provoking selections below and learn more about the power of water, what happens when an environment changes, using authentic data, myths about English Language Learners, and other important topics in K–12 science education.
While stability and change are phenomena that we deal with frequently within many science concepts, they are rarely pointed out or emphasized. This issue of Science and Children offers ideas for helping students identify when they recognize these elements within the investigations and when it is appropriate to use these terms.
Featured articles (please note, only those marked “free” are available to nonmembers without a fee):
Gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data are at the heart of doing science. In this issue we offer a variety of activities you can use with your students to engage them with real-world data as they explore different science topics. We hope they will help your students make better sense of the world around them.
Featured articles (please note, only those marked “free” are available to nonmembers without a fee):
This issue of The Science Teacher marks our 20th consecutive annual issue devoted to the theme of “Science for All.” Teaching strategies targeted toward a specific group almost always turn out to improve learning for all groups. And so, when this issue suggests ways to use quality graphics to support English language learners or provides ideas for using videos to engage reluctant readers, you will also discover ideas that work for all students who struggle to read science texts. Likewise, in an article describing strategies to support students with weak executive functioning skills, you will find ways to improve all your students’ organization, planning, and self-regulation abilities. High-quality teaching strategies like those in this issue benefit students well beyond the targeted groups.
YouTube fans, watch high school science teacher and TST Field Editor, Steve Metz, introduce this month’s issue.
Featured articles (please note, only those marked “free” are available to nonmembers without a fee):
Get these journals in your mailbox as well as your inbox—become an NSTA member!
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By Peggy Ashbrook
Posted on 2015-05-10
In my neighborhood, flowing rainwater from rooftops and yards is making a small gully in the hillside before it runs into the street and goes into the storm sewer. The hillside used to be just a grassy slope. As the original bare patch deepened, roots and rocks became visible in the soil. I wondered what changes in the neighborhood made this happen? The neighborhood is a system of surfaces where rain falls and flows off on its way to the river—roof tops, downspouts, drainage pipes to direct the water, trees, grass yards, garden slopes, sidewalks and roads. What changes in this system led to the erosion of the hillside?
Maybe your children can see the changes made by rain or wind in their local environment. Observing these changes can help us think of our neighborhood and environment as a system. “A system is an organized group of related objects or components that form a whole. (NRC 1996).”
A common and simple system that children work with in early childhood programs is the structure they build from blocks. Teachers have a role in supporting children’s work in block building. Professional organizations that support teaching science, The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), provide some resources (some at no cost) to help us understand
how to maximize children’s learning in the block area. The topic of the March issue of Young Children is “Blocks: Great Learning Tools From Infancy Through the Primary Grades.” Two of the articles available to non-members address block building in preschool: Building Bridges to Understanding in a Preschool Classroom: A Morning in the Block Center by Lea Ann Christenson and Jenny James, and Using Blocks to Develop 21st Century Skills by Karen Wise Lindeman and Elizabeth McKendry Anderson.
Susan Friedman, Executive Editor of Digital Content at NAEYC, reminisced about the materials on the block shelves in her first classroom on the NAEYC blog—add your comment to describe your block area and how the children use it.
In the Early Years column in the April/May 2015 Science and Children, I wrote about exploring stability and change in other systems common in early childhood. There are many ways to investigate stability and change in both natural and built worlds. Block building learning in a Head Start classroom is described by Chalufour, Hoisington, Moriarty, Winokur, and Worth in “The Science and Mathematics of Building Structures” in Science and Children (2004).
In block building, children choose the objects or components that form the whole, often making changes as they build to meet their goals of stability, aesthetics and usefulness. “I’m building a road,” a child says, and drives a small model of a car along it. Another child builds a house alongside the road, and then a bridge to go over the road when more children join in building on the other side of the road. Children make changes as they respond to the needs of their imagined community to get across the road. The need to consider balance and stability increases as children build up. Although children control the objects in their built system, they may not yet understand what makes their structure stable.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) state that the progression of understanding of the crosscutting concept Stability and Change begins in kindergarten–grade 2 as “students observe some things stay the same while other things change, and things may change slowly or rapidly” (p. 10). An additional goal stated by A Framework for K–12 Science Education is to help children recognize that it can be as important to ask why something does not change as it is to ask why it does (NRC 2012, p. 101).
Even in second grade, children may be working out how to build a stable tower. In a 1-hour after-school class to explore building ramps to create marble runs, several children in grade 2 tried over and over to support a ramp with a long rectangular block standing on one end. They repeated this process for several weeks although
they could see more stable tall structures built by other children and I asked them to think about what they could change to keep their structure from falling over. After more several weeks and pairing with another student, these children are now building stable tall structures. They needed time to construct their understanding through repeated experiences. (More information about building ramp structures can be found on the Regents’ Center for Early Developmental Education’s CEESTEM website at http://www.uni.edu/rampsandpathways/ )
If girls in your program rarely play with blocks, or boys rarely play in the imaginative play center, Janis Strasser and Lisa Mufson Koeppel have some tips for encouraging children to try out the centers they do not usually visit.
In “A Developmental Look at a Rigorous Block Play Program” by Diane Hobenshield Tepylo, Joan Moss, and Carol Stephenson, the authors examine the block play in a prekindergarten class, and encourage us to create a carefully considered block program.
Where do your children investigate stability and change in systems?
Resources
Chalufour, Ingrid and Hoisington, Cindy; Moriarty, Robin; Winokur, Jeff; Worth, Karen. 2004. The Science and Mathematics of Building Structures. Science and Children. 41 (4): 30-34 http://www.nsta.org/publications/article.aspx?id=ZacGSosEPpc=
Lindeman, Karen Wise and Elizabeth McKendry Anderson. 2015. Using Blocks to Develop 21st Century Skills. Young Children 70 (1): 36-43. http://www.naeyc.org/yc/article/using_blocks_develop_21st_century_skills_Lindeman
National Research Council (NRC). 2012. A Framework for K–12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practices-crosscutting-concepts
National Research Council (NRC). 1996. National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/4962/national-science-education-standards
NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For states, by states. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards
Strasser, Janis and Lisa Mufson Koeppel. 2010. Block Building and Make Believe for Every Child. Teaching Young Children. 3 (3): 14-15. http://www.naeyc.org/yc/files/yc/file/201503/YC0315_Tepylo.pdf
Tepylo, Diane Hobenshield, and Joan Moss and Carol Stephenson. 2015. A Developmental Look at a Rigorous Block Play Program. Young Children 70 (1): 18-25. http://www.naeyc.org/yc/files/yc/file/201503/YC0315_Tepylo.pdf
In my neighborhood, flowing rainwater from rooftops and yards is making a small gully in the hillside before it runs into the street and goes into the storm sewer. The hillside used to be just a grassy slope. As the original bare patch deepened, roots and rocks became visible in the soil. I wondered what changes in the neighborhood made this happen? The neighborhood is a system of surfaces where rain falls and flows off on its way to the river—roof tops, downspouts, drainage pipes to direct the water, trees, grass yards, garden slopes, sidewalks and roads.
By Mary Bigelow
Posted on 2015-05-06
Do you have any suggestions on how to help students review and apply what they learn during a unit? I’ve tried creating games and contests, but the students don’t seem to get much out of them. —C., Minnesota
Many teachers have special review sessions prior to a test. With my middle and high school students, I found a few issues with this practice:
So I changed my plans to incorporate periodic review sessions, rather than a marathon one at the end of the unit. Here are some review activities that involved students, seemed to be most helpful for them, and did not take a lot of planning time.
The specialized vocabulary in science is a challenge for students. These activities required students to do more than match a word with a definition:
Ask students throughout the unit to create questions as a review, putting a question on one side of an index card with the response on the reverse. I found the students focused more on lower level questions. So I took cubes (I found blank ones in a craft store) and the students wrote (or pasted) six question starters Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How on them. The students, working in teams, rolled the cube and used the starter that came out on top. (If a unit did not focus on Who concepts, students used Why or How instead.) We passed the sets around during other review sessions. If a team came up with a response that was different from the one on the card or if the given response was incomplete or incorrect, they could add it (after checking it out with me and the original writers). We used these during the unit, adding to the stack after each topic, and also at other times when there were a few minutes left over in class or before a major holiday break. The students also enjoyed looking at the responses and trying to figure out the questions.
Another successful strategy was having students create “info cards.” For every unit the students each had a 4X6 index card and could write down whatever information they wanted from their notes or other references. They were allowed to refer to the cards during the test (there were very few recall items on the test). I collected the cards with the test papers so that students could not “share” their cards.
The students soon realized that they had to actually review their notes and other resources to create the card. They had to select important information, summarize, prioritize, and decide what they did or did not know–important, higher-level skills. One student remarked that making the cards was the most time he ever spent reviewing (and he had good test results to show for it).
I also observed that by having some information available during the test, the students’ responses to open-ended questions were much improved. Looking at the cards also gave me some feedback on what the students considered important. Afterwards, I asked the students to incorporate the cards into their notebooks for future reference.
These activities also served as a type of formative assessment. As students worked on them, I could circulate around the room and observe their work, looking for misconceptions, misunderstandings, or incomplete understandings.
Do you have any suggestions on how to help students review and apply what they learn during a unit? I’ve tried creating games and contests, but the students don’t seem to get much out of them. —C., Minnesota
Many teachers have special review sessions prior to a test. With my middle and high school students, I found a few issues with this practice: