The battlebots have been awesome. The students have just completed the first build of the bots. The learned a lot about the different components and ow much it actually takes to get anything to work well together, as a system. That system thinking is one of the big takeaways I wanted my students to have. Understanding that each system has to work…Read More

For my Newton’s Playground grant, the sensors were a huge success! I had 3 groups working with the new sensors and 2 working with the old (because of lack of equipment) and it was a huge difference.
The labquest group did more trials, had far less error associated with the lab, and did it all in less time. It saved the students a lot of time on…Read More

I received my first round of the new vernier equipment. I did a lab with 3 groups using the new equipment and groups using the old equipment (because i just didn’t have enough for that large of a class). I made them do a little bit of error calculations and you would not believe the difference it made. The error associated with the new stuff was…Read More

For my innovation grant, I focused on keeping my physics and engineering class engaging an interactive. I used the money to get a robotics simulation so even if we are not in school, the students can learn to code the robot. The code will run a virtual robot and you can assign tasks to the students so they can do different challenges like maneuver…Read More

As for the 3-D printing with the special education grant, unfortunately the 3-D printer messed up right before Christmas and I was unable to fix it until Christmas break. This means we did not get to sell Christmas ornaments like we originally wanted. On the bright side, the special ed class did come up and help design ornaments with my…Read More

The demos have been doing great in my lab so far! I have not looked at the raw data for the demos themselves but I can just say, they seem to be working really well and making me able to create a story line around certain lessons.

My students completed their engineering challenge as their finals in Earth and Space. Since then, they have done another engineering challenge. I have not taken the data from before and after yet, but as far as their preparation and critically thinking skills, there was a HUGE difference. They thought out what their plan was before they worked and…Read More

I’m very excited to be bringing a little bit of engineering back to my hometown. I have ordered the robots using the money I got from the innovation grant and should have them in soon. I hope the kids enjoy it as much as I will!