Engineering in the Winter Olympics

Friday, February 9th marks the beginning of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. We'll have 242 athletes representing the United States in the winter games competing for gold, silver, and bronze medals. There will be millions of us following the games closely and cheering on the American athletes. One of my favorite events to watch is bobsledding, so I was immediately hooked when I heard about Brooke Brown's bobsled engineering challenge!

If you're not following Brooke Brown, you should stop what you're doing and look her up immediately. She shares a ton of fantastic ideas for integrating STEM into the classroom. Her Teach Outside the Box blog is one of my favorites.

In her bobsled engineering challenge, students first enjoy the book Tacky and the Winter Games where Tacky and his companions train to represent Nice Icy Land in different winter events. One of which being the bobsled-less race. This event is the perfect opportunity for your students to get their engineering on! Using only aluminum foil, 2 straws, 2 toothpicks, a few pieces of tape, scissors and a piece of poster board, challenge your students to create their own bobsled for Tacky!

You can connect this challenge to your math curriculum by requiring your students to measure the distance their bobsled travels using standard or non-standard units of measurement. They could even create a class graph using the data from each team's distance traveled. Brooke has tons of resources to go along with this lesson including vocabulary cards, anchor charts, and nonfiction research that you can pick up from Teachers Pay Teachers here.

This is a great STEM activity to get your students excited about the Winter Olympics. Just make sure Tacky doesn't tumble out of his bobsled!

Shout out to Mrs. Robledo for sharing this idea!

-Clint

Three Schools, One Team: Northern Moore Middle FTC Team

If you’ve been keeping up with the Moore County EV3 Robotics Competitions for the past few years then you’d know that the Northern Moore Area middle schools are a force to be reckoned with.  In fact, Westmoore Elementary has won first place in the middle school competition for the past two years.  With the increase in student success in our local competitions and the continuous development of their computer programming skills, six of our Northern Moore Area middle school students will be taking their talents to the next level in robotics, First Tech Challenge (FTC).

For this post, guest bloggers and Robo Colts team members Lindy Wiseman (Westmoore), Annievette Camcho (Elise), and River Seawell (Highfalls) share their FTC journey so far. 

Team #13780 Robo Colts is a rookie FTC Team consisting of students in 6th, 7th and 8th grade.  Our team is a combined team of three students from Elise, two students from Highfalls K-8, and one student from Westmoore K-8, all located in the Northern Moore area of Moore County Schools.  All club members have at least two years of experience with Lego EV3 Robotics and have competed in the Moore County Schools robotic competitions.  

In FTC,  we work as a team to build and make modifications to the programming and structure of the robot.   The most challenging thing about FTC is coming up with new ideas to fix problems.  Since we come from three different schools, transportation to the meetings has also been challenging.  Luckily, our team members from Westmoore and Highfalls were able to ride the bus to Elise with the athletic teams, but if there was no sports practice, then we wouldn’t have transportation, and that was very frustrating.     

Our first practice was on October 17th.  We practiced once a week and sometimes twice a week if we had transportation.  We competed in Moore County School’s Winter Warriors competition on December 15th.  With only a couple of month’s to build a robot, learn how to program it, and learn how to drive it, we felt nervous and unsure of how we would do in the competition.

On the day of the competition, we did not feel confident because we were competing against people who have been in FTC for a couple of years and had more experience than us. During the interview, we were nervous about speaking in front of the judges, but we were confident in our engineering notebook and our robot design.

When we started the competition we felt discouraged because our controller broke and our robot started acting up.  Luckily, we were able to borrow a controller from another team.  When we had our first round, we started feeling more confident because we were able to successfully stack multiple glyphs. As the rounds went on we felt even more confident because we continued to do well, and we were even the first team to successfully accomplish autonomous mode, which is where the robot drives itself according to code written by our team programmers Lindy and Alex.  From this competition we learned that it takes a lot of teamwork to be successful.

A big part of FTC is gracious professionalism.  Gracious professionalism is a way of doing things that value others, respects individuals as well as the community, it also communicates and encourages high-quality work. At Winter Warriors we demonstrated gracious professionalism by helping another team find the parts they needed when their robot malfunctioned. We learned from other teams that we need to have a diverse skill set within our own team. An example of this would be that our programmers could also drive the robot, and the drivers would be able to program. As a young team, we enjoyed competing with older students that we could learn from.

The competition was very close, and we were excited to be one of the two teams competing in the championship round! The final round was very close, and our team and our alliance, Union Pines High School were one point away from first place! When the winners were announced, we were were very surprised to be named the winners of the Think Award, the award for best interview, engineering notebook, and overall gracious professionalism!

On Saturday, January 27th we will compete in the NC FTC Qualifier in Durham.  We are most looking forward to getting to meet other teams and see their techniques with their robot.  This may be our first year of FTC but we are confident in ourselves as well as our team. No matter what happens at the competition we will always be there to support our team as well as others.

We have enjoyed participating in FTC this year, and we are thankful for receiving the FTC Rookie Grant that provided the funding for our robot. Being on this team has allowed us to build friendships with our teammates from other schools, as well as learn more about the importance of working together.  We are thankful for this opportunity and cannot wait to get to work for next year!

-Lindy, Annie, River

The Robo Colts members with the Think Award: River Seawell, Alex Simpson (Elise), Lindy Wiseman, Neil Seawell (Highfalls), Caleb Sexton (Elise), Annievette Camcho.

The Northern Moore Middle Robo Colts are coached by DIFs Will Allred and Carrie Robledo.  For more information about FTC, check out their website: https://www.ncfllandftc.com/what-is-firstreg-tech-challenge.html

Make sure to follow me on Twitter (@carrierobledo) for updates on Saturday’s competition!

-Carrie

First Bits and Bytes - Creating and Coding Circuits with Arduino

The 4th graders at Southern Pines Elementary School are learning about series and parallel circuits.  Have you ever wondered what it would be like if your holiday lights were designed using a series circuit?  Each time a light malfunctioned, your entire strand of lights would go out!  

That would not be very good!

These students enjoyed a lesson with the Arduino Uno mini computer system, circuit building, 

and coding!

They created both series and parallel circuits and then wrote code using the Codebender App to make their LED lights blink in a certain pattern.  

 

Lesson Highlights Video

How to use a breadboard Video

How to install and use the Codebender App Video


Lesson Plan

Lesson Handouts

Journal Tasks

Printable Breadboard for Circuit Creation

Advanced Blink Code for 4 LEDs

Arduino Kit Link




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Visual Design in HS World History

OCTOBER Spotlighting Moore

LISA MURPHY - UPHS

3D PRINTING HIGH SCHOOL WORLD HISTORY
--A SUCCESS STORY WITH A TEMPLATE

___

By WILL HERRING

3d Printing in History Class?

Yes! The problem has always been the same with teaching history, right? How do we make something come alive for students that has been dead for decades, centuries, or in the case of world history, millennia? Ms. Murphy and I hoped that visual design software and 3D printers might span that gap making history “tangible”.  We were willing to gamble the increased time spent studying the ancient world would pay off when they see all future learning through the lens of a builder and engineer.

TinkerCad

Our software of choice was a web-based app called TinkerCad. It is a great, lightweight, and Chromebook ready (MCS are 1:1 Chromebooks in 5-12th). It is integrated with Google SSO as well as other social providers, meaning it is just that much easier to go from 0 to 60 with TinkerCad in your classroom. It has a menu of “getting started” type tutorials we used to get the kids to figure out the basics of computer-aided design.

Timeline

We co-taught part of most Thursdays during the first 9 weeks of school.

Week One: Introduction, objectives explained, rubric discussed, and Wonder of the Ancient World (WoW) assigned to groups. With the class size, we were working with, we decided to add an “eighth” WoW to make the groups more manageable (The Great Wall of China). The second half of class was unstructured to allow groups to research the function/purpose, dimensions, era, and location of their assigned WoW.

Week Two: Groups presented their Slides and answered questions from the audience. They were expected to demonstrate an understanding of the purpose and the people that built the assigned WoW.

Week Three: Student groups were taken through two, TinkerCad lessons on shape manipulation in the visual design interface. Students were asked to reflect on their work from the perspective of the Engineering Design Process. They were provided butcher paper, and rulers, calculators to figure the scale for their design to meet our 3D printer’s size.

Week Four: Design day 1. Students went through tutorials about using the ruler, workplane, and alignment tools. Then began designing their structures. Ms. Murphy and I circulated to talk about how to work within a group effectively and troubleshoot any software problems.

Week Five: Design Day 2. Students were given time to complete their structures and export their .stl files for printing.

Week Six: Presentation prep. Students were informed of the expectations for their final presentation. While I was busy putting the 3d printer through its workout around the clock, students went back to their Slides from Week 2, modified historical content to express their increased knowledge, as well as additional information about the design and group work components of their work.

Week Six: Minimal class time allowed for groups to determine responsibilities for the upcoming assembly play day.

Week Seven: Assembly Play Day. I delivered the printed parts, the students assembled them, painted them and added other elements to make the creation more engaging to the audience.

Week Eight: Presentations! I’ll let the students do the talking here! Make sure to note the higher order thinking going on to put this all together.

Extension

Next nine weeks students will select and defend their own ideas for a more modern wonder of the world. We will expand this out to include anything from the locomotive to the Gutenberg Press… as long as they can defend WHY it is a Wonder of the World!

Mrs. Perkins Supports Literacy with Virtual Reality

Mrs. Perkins Supports Literacy with Virtual Reality

I was pumped when Mrs. Perkins, an 8th Grade English Language Arts teacher at New Century Middle School, reached out to me about the possibility of using Virtual Reality headsets in her classroom.  With the popularity of VR headsets on the rise in the past 3 years, finding ways to effectively incorporate them into classroom instruction is something new to me so I was going to need some help.  Mrs. Perkins and I sat down during her planning period and figured out how we could use VR headsets to support a book study her class is doing.  The book "Inside Out & Back Again" is an award winning book about a ten year old girl's refugee experience during the Vietnam War era and how her family was forced to flee as Saigon fell.  

Mrs. Perkins had the idea of wanting students to view different settings and places mentioned throughout the book, as well as places that would provide relevance for students.  Mrs. Perkins and I decided on six different places for students to visit.  

1. A farm in Vietnam
2. Museum of Ho Chi Minh Trail
3. Ho Chi Minh at night
4. Galang Refugee Camp in Indonesia
5. War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh
6. Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC

Using the Google Street View application, students were able navigate places thousands of miles away.  The instant relevance could be seen when all of the students were talking about different places that were represented in the book.  Students could be heard around the room saying things like,  "Now I see what Ha (main character in the book) was talking about." 

The best part about the lesson was what Mrs. Perkins had the students do afterwards.  Mrs. Perkins had students write a short reflection about how the things they saw today in the VR headsets related to their book study they had been doing.  

Books have the unique ability to allow you travel the world.  The technology available today lets students compare their mental images with actual images submitted by people from all over the world.  

You can follow Mrs. Perkins on Twitter to see all of the other cool things she is doing in her classroom.  

STEM Community Leaders in MCS

If you've been following this blog or our Twitter feed (@MCSDigital), you've undoubtedly noticed a heavy emphasis on STEM learning in MCS.  From K-12 robotics to Cyber Patriot to science kits to STEM Camp to engineering lessons and everything in between- STEM concepts have swept through the district at a blistering pace, supported by our DIF team and our teachers.

Another major support system for this revolution in our schools is a group most folks likely have no idea even exist- our STEM Community Leaders group- a group that has been meeting to help promote and sustain STEM learning in Moore County Schools for more than 5 years!

This is a dynamic group of important stakeholders in our county- including local and regional business leaders, community organization leaders, parents, School Board members, Foundation members, as well as MCS curriculum and senior staff.  Here is a list of the groups and businesses whose members/representatives have been involved:

The Public Education Foundation of Moore County
Moore County Partners in Progress
Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Duke Energy
The Palmer Foundation
Mebane Foundation
Kiwanis Club of the Sandhills
Sandhills Rotary Club
NC Realtors Association
Smithsonian Science Education Center
NC Inquiry Collaborative Network (NCICN)
North Carolina Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center
Moore County Airport
First Tee of the Sandhills
Woodmen of the Wild
The Pilot
C.A.L.L. (Community Assisting Language Learners)

What impact does this group have on Moore County Schools students and teachers?
The impact this group has had has been deep and far-reaching.  They are a source of advisory ideas as well as financial backing.  3 years ago, a large STEM grant from the Mebane Foundation was expiring.  This grant planted many of the seeds of STEM within Moore County Schools and when it ended we were faced with a problem- how to sustain and grow these vital STEM initiatives after the grant funds had expired.

In order to solve this problem, the Public Education Foundation (PEF) offered the opportunity to create a separate "STEM Bucket" for grants and donations to flow into in order to sustain our growth.  The members of the STEM Community Leaders then worked hard to obtain grants and donations in order to build a "bridge to sustainability" for all of our STEM programs in the district. 



The results of this work were extremely impressive.  This group was able to raise over $75,000 over the course of the 2015-2016 school year in order to sustain our programs and allow us to build a self-sustaining funding model (our STEM Camp tuition goes directly to support all of these programs in MCS).  In addition, generous grants and donations continue to be facilitated by this group in order to add "fuel to the fire" as well as cover student scholarships to STEM Camp for those families who are unable to pay.  Keep in mind, this is all in addition to the targeted grants that the Public Ed Foundation have utilized to spark interest in STEM across the district.

In short, we could not be the leaders in STEM that we are in Moore County without this dedicated group who many people may not know about (and therefore be able to recognize and thank!).   If you are ever in contact with members of any of the above organizations, please tell them thank you for their support of engaged student learning in MCS!!!

A Creation and Collaboration Transformation

Technology tools like Seesaw and Flipgrid provide a space for students to record their own voices to share their thoughts, questions, ideas, and solutions.  But in a crowded classroom, how can you drown out the background noise?  Sheila Self, Reading Interventionist at Carthage Elementary School has just the solution.  In her classroom, Mrs. Self has created a designated recording studio area made with storage cubes and foam.  Check this out!

To make this recording studio, start with a collapsible fabric storage cube (12.8in x 12.8in x 15in)  

Insert foam acoustic panels (1in x 12in X 12in) into the bottom and 2 sides of the storage cube.

A wire book stand in the bottom of the cube holds the iPad.  

To prevent background noise while recording, Mrs. Self added a brightly colored retro handset that plugs into the headphone jack.

(Advice from Mrs. Self: It is not necessary to have both the foam acoustic panels and the handset for noise-free recording. It works either way but the handset offers less background noise.)   

In Seesaw, students take a photo of the pages they want to record for fluency then record their reading.  According to Mrs. Self, any recording done with the retro handset has a better sound quality and it gets the students excited about recording and doing their best reading.  Using the phone handset reminds the student that their reading should sound just like they were talking to someone on the phone.  The directions from Seesaw are posted at the recording station so students can refer to it for recording.

Check out these examples!

With the retro phone

Without the retro phone

In addition to using Seesaw, Mrs. Self has recently started using Flipgrid to amplify student voice.  For more information about Flipgrid and how you can use this in your classroom, check out this awesome blog post from STEM teacher extraordinaire Kim Collazo.

-Carrie