STEM

Big payoff for science students at ISEF

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Not only is science fun, it could have a big payoff for students.

Big, as in $150,000!

The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (of ISEF), the world’s largest pre-university science competition, really rewards budding scientists,engineers and inventors.. This year three students won the top $150,000 prize each. Second place winners won $75,000 each.

This year’s ISEF Fair will be held here in Phoenix from May 8 – 11th. I plan to be there. Interestingly, three Sri Lankan students will be participating in it.

Founded 75 years ago, the fair attracts some 1,700 high school students from over 75 countries, regions, and territories who showcase their research and compete for approximately $4 million in prizes.

One of the winners (left), 17-year old Paige Brown, found a way to filter pollutants in stream water, and has nano-technology in her sights to expand on the device.

This kind of scientific problem-solving is extremely relevant here in the US, where several cities are discovering high levels of lead in drinking water, after the Flint, Michigan disaster. As the New York Times states in its report, “Rules and science are outdated.”

The future generation of scientists and policy makers like Paige will be updating the science. Other students are ‘discovering’ new ways for disease management and medical breakthroughs.

All this while still in school!

 

Earth to Scott Kelly: Welcome home!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Watching Scott Kelly, and his ongoing work on the International Space Station for the past year has been like following a live-action science-and-technology class.

Many of the NASA-related activities in our school this past year (talking with an engineer at JPL, and the crew of a Mars mission simulation etc) have directly or indirectly addressed to the big question “What will it be like to live on Mars?” Astro-twins Scott and Mark Kelly, have become the human faces of astronomy, aerospace, and space exploration.

Students keep asking questions such as:

What kind of ‘work’ do engineers and astronauts do, besides floating around doing ‘space gardening’ and 3D mapping? Some amazing work is described here. We watched some incredible views taken by GoPro cameras aboard the ISS, including one involving inserting the GoPro into a water bubble.

On the fun side, I’ve even used Scott’s Time Magazine cover photo to teach a class on Photoshop (replacing Kelly with a 6th grade teacher who’s got a similar look.)

Here’s hoping we see more of Kelly brothers, and get to hear from Scott. Perhaps in a future Mars Day!

He should be back on earth tonight – NASA says touchdown is scheduled for 11:27 pm Eastern Time. As he put it in 140 characters before he left the ISS, “the journey isn’t over.”

Continuing Digital Learning Day – Don Wilde on Arduino and micro-controllers

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

DonWilde_tnToday Don Wilde, former Intel engineer, and FLL robotics coach/judge, was here to show our students a different side of programming – the Arduino board.

Don talked about how programming has been invading almost every part of our lives, from cars (which house dozens of computers), and houses to businesses, and libraries. (This session was fittingly held in the library – and I mentioned how students today self-check in and check out their books with a scanner and software).

He also stressed the point of how engineers are needed to design robots, and for online stores, casinos and satellites to function. “Highly-paid work today, whether it is in entertainment or communication needs engineers and programmers, and you could be one of them,” he said.

Don then demonstrated one of the devices he had put together for this, using a off-the-shelf Arduino Uno board. He connected a series of light, touch and sound sensors to show how this plug-and-play device worked.

 

Board_DLDay2016

By way of comparison, he talked about the Lego NXT robot, itself a micro-controller, with which many students in both 5th and 6th grades are familiar. We have had a robotics program in the school for the past 6 years. Thanks to Don, I have become interested in introducing Arduino to my class. Perhaps someday, we will have programming as a regular class, rather than an add-on to the curriculum!

Micro-controllers_DLDay2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When is too early to start building apps?

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

avatar_new_resizedToday, for Digital Learning Day, I’m inviting an App developer, Chris Cardinal, of Synapse Studios, to introduce our 5th and 6th grade students to apps.This is going to be an eye-opener, since I get a lot of questions about coding and app building. None of us are programmers, but I have channeled self-paced lessons through Code.org and Khan Academy before. This time, having a live app class will make a huge difference.

Tomorrow  we will have Don Wilde to introduce students to Arduino! It appears it’s never too early for students to dip their hands into computer science, and understanding programming. Thank you Chris and Don for taking time to be here at Salt River Elementary.DLDay 2016

Wed 17 Feb, 2016   – Chris Cardinal, Synapse Studios

1:00 – 1:40 pm  – 6th grades  “Creating Apps for a Digital World”                       

1:45 – 2:25 pm  – 5th Grades  “Creating Apps for a Digital World”

 

Thurs 18 Feb, 2016  – Don Wilde, former Intel ProgrammerDonW

1:00 – 1:40 pm  – 6th Grades  “Programming Beyond  Lego – Arduino and Beyond ”  

1:45 – 2:25 pm  – 5th Grades  “Programming Beyond  Lego – Arduino and Beyond ”  

    synapse_studios_logo

Teaching them to Code, one block at a time

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

My colleague and robotics coach, Donna Horn gave me a Wall Street Journal article on Coding that’s worth sharing. It’s about why coding shouldn’t be so intimidating (at least to us teachers who didn’t learn to code).

Titled “We want our children to code, even if we can’t.” it argues why this is a skill we need to introduce early and often. Reading. Writing, and Coding…The timing of the article is not accidental.

February is when Coding fills the news, since Digital Learning Day is on Feb 17th. This year we have plenty to pick from –the usual powerhouses Code.Org and Khan Academy. There’s also Scratch, and other visual programming tools. Plus, there’s Mindstorms, the visual programming language we use in robotics.

Grant Smith, a tech writer for Edutopia makes a god point about teaching coding in schools. We need to set the stage first by (a) Curating the resources into the curriculum  (b) Organizing the classroom to be coder-friendly and (c) Rallying around those who might support your initiative. Including use some of the social media tools to build one’s personal learning network or PLN.

I’m planning on getting experts to come into the classroom, and teach.Ideally I’m thinking of App developers, from surrounding tech companies.

Please contact me if you know of someone!

It’s a kite. It’s a tethered bird. Could it be a drone?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I love how this guy is disrupting the idea of what we think of a drone, to re-frame it as a kite.

A kite that takes pictures, that is.

Funny how we box ourselves in by classifying things the way they originally emerged as. Is a cell phone today really a phone? Ore more recently, with the idea of a supersized ‘commuter drone’, is a drone a light aircraft that may or may not need to be autonomous? But apart from the boxing ourselves in, the need to be creative is often stymied by those who are reluctant to make mistakes.

Sergei Lupashin, in the video below spoke at an Education technology conference last year about this. His point being we need to get young people to feel comfortable with making  a lot of mistakes! That is how we could make breakthroughs

 

If you haven’t seen the Chinese-made single passenger drone, here’s how they position it – learning from their mistakes. Um crashes!

 

International Ping-Pong Space Station

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Space could be fun (OK, except for dehydrated food) especially if they let you play a few games. All in the line of testing out how some materials behave in micro-gravity.

One of my colleagues lets students work on NASA projects, such as making a glider out of a shoe-box, or growing vegetables in space-like conditions. Her students are currently working on how ‘toys in space’ might perform.

So in this line of thinking, there’s Scott Kelly, who’s spending a year in space, playing ping-pong with a water droplet. If only he played against, say Sergey Volkov or Timothy Peake (UK). That would make it a more realistic international playoff.

So kids aren’t playing with rubber bands and string anymore?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

True story: Recently I took a small group of students to visit a lab, and while breaking for lunch on some garden benches, they began climbing the trees nearby. They were getting a bit noisy when a lady walking by stopped and looked up into the branches. I thought I would get asked to get them to ‘behave’. But the lady smiled and said loudly to others passing by, “Look! look! children are playing on trees again!”

It took me a few seconds to figure out what she was really saying – that having seen so many kids today plugged into screens, it’s thrilling to see them having fun scampering up trees. (Side note: this was outside a Mars Space lab in Tempe, Arizona, and we were on a field trip to see a whole lot of technology!)

Drawing from : 7th period: Feed a Fish Wikispaces page Click on image to visit this class project page

I keep this in mind when I introduce students to new technologies. Last week, I began a lesson on animation, and as subject matter, I returned to the ‘Rube Goldberg Machine.’ We don’t always need screens for this. (Unless we need to check out the many Rube Goldberg contests like this.). How could we turn students into makers, and innovators, problem-solvers and scientific thinkers?

A Rube Goldberg Machine (or ‘contraption‘) teaches us a lot about levers, gravity, kinetic energy, and chain reactions among other things – such as precision, iterative design, and learning from failure. All it takes is some lengths of wood, string, paper cups, shoe boxes, old clothes hangers, marbles and/or ping-pong balls, rubber bands and cardboard tubes.

I like to get them to ‘design’ their machine first, and see what they come up with – then set them on a building mission! We could use a drawing app, but paper and pencil work just fine!

Image on right – One of the manyprojects from a 7th grade class – found here

Google’s ‘Expedition’ project visits Arizona

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

So I’ve got ‘Google Cardboard’glasses ready, and I’m excited to hear that Google will be here in Arizona this week. It’s part of their roll out of Google Expeditions – a classroom project using virtual reality. A few weeks back I applied to have them come out and run VR sessions, so –fingers crossed — I’m hoping my school gets picked.

So what’s Google Expeditions? There’s a good explanation here on this EdTech site, EdSurge. The Google team is visiting selected schools in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Brazil, Canada, Singapore and Denmark. Each school will get an Expeditions kit – probably a VR ‘Cardboard’ headset, and apps. I noticed that the ‘expeditions’ feature a wide range of topics from ancient civilizations and rain forests, to space and historical events.

Think of it Expeditions as a virtual field trip, or more appropriately, an immersive experience that you could not get out of a text book – something I touched on in the recent Sri Lanka STEAM workshops for teachers.