Week 3 - Cardboard Boat Building

This week we were able to try out the engineering-redesign process for ourselves. We participated in cardboard boat races, which are something historically done at CMU during Homecoming festivities by freshmen engineering students. We were given 7 items ( ducktape and cardboard, in any ratio we choose ), and two hours to build boats that had to float about 100ft across a pond. The teams were:
Steve, Levi, and Jeff
Janet, Shawn, and Matt
Aaron, Lisa, and Andy
Sandy, Michelle, and Kasey
Ze and Jenny

Sandy, Michelle, and Kasey were successful, as well as Janet, Shawn, and Matt in reaching the other side of the pond. Here are some photos and videos from our day of fun!

Click Here to see the Photos

Click here for Week 2's Photos

 

Teaching Changed Lessons

One of the new components of our program is to have the teachers show us a lesson that they have adapted with engineering principals as a result of our work last summer. We began with Lisa showing us a discovery lesson with Fizzalicious drink tabs. Shawn then showed us a shell classification lab he adapted, and today Steve showed us a Robot Basketball Project. The following are pictures from Steve's TCL (Teaching a Changed Lesson). We have all really enjoyed seeing how the things we have learned last summer, and this summer already, can be used in our classrooms.

Pictures from Week 1

Check out what has been going on during week 1. We have had some tutorials with the NGSS, as well as some technology that will be useful in our future classrooms.
https://plus.google.com/photos/104953658096340663285/albums/5899008601969057313?authkey=CL6etdqR3OTQnQE#photos/104953658096340663285/albums/5899008601969057313?authkey=CL6etdqR3OTQnQE

Return to Mt. Pleasant

On Monday July 8th, the in-service and pre-service teachers returned to the ET building to start another summer of learning and discovery. We started right into our projects with some new twists. This year, we will be working on aligning our current content with the Next Generation Science Standards, and then spending our afternoons in labratory working on engineering projects. I will be back later with more updates on the program :)