Tag: Relevance

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Solve This Problem, You’ll Learn the Skills Along the Way

Wisconsin STEM Summit I’m in the Wisconsin Dells today to deliver a four-hour training session for CESA 6. It’s entitled “21st Century Skills in Action: Project Based Learning in the STEM Classroom.”  We’ll be using a Turning Point ARS and lots of activities so that participants experience the why, what, and how of PBL in the STEM curriculum.

Students explore their world with an expectation of choice and control that redefines traditional notions of learning and literacy. Educators are discovering that they can motivate students with a PBL approach that engages their students with the opportunity to behave like STEM professionals while solving real-world problems.

I was pleased to read an interesting piece in the NY Times on yesterday’s flight. “Computer Studies Made Cool, on Film and Now on Campus” (6/11/11). While the focus is on the growing popularity of computer science, it make a strong case for the project based approach to learning. 

The new curriculums emphasize the breadth of careers that use computer science, as diverse as finance and linguistics, and the practical results of engineering, like iPhone apps, Pixar films and robots, a world away from the more theory-oriented curriculums of the past.

The old-fashioned way of computer science is, ‘We’re going to teach you a bunch of stuff that is fundamental and will be long-lasting but we won’t tell you how it’s applied,’ ” said Michael Zyda, director of the University of Southern California’s GamePipe Laboratory, a new games program in the computer science major. With the rejuvenated classes, freshman enrollment in computer science at the university grew to 120 last year, from 25 in 2006. …

To hook students, Yale computer science professors are offering freshman seminars with no prerequisites, like one on computer graphics, in which students learn the technical underpinnings of a Pixar movie.
“Historically this department has been very theory-oriented, but in the last few years, we’re broadening the curriculum,” said Julie Dorsey, a professor.

She also started a new major, computing and the arts, which combines computer science with art, theater or music to teach students how to scan and restore paintings or design theater sets.

Professors stress that concentrating on the practical applications of computer science does not mean teaching vocational skills like programming languages, which change rapidly. Instead, it means guiding students to tackle real-world problems and learn skills and theorems along the way.

“Once people are kind of subversively exposed to it, it’s not someone telling you, ‘You should program because you can be an engineer and do this in the future,’ ” said Ms. Fong, the Yale student. “It’s, ‘Solve this problem, build this thing and make this robot go from Point A to Point B,’ and you gain the skill set associated with it.” With other students, she has already founded a Web start-up, the Closer Grocer, which delivers groceries to dorms.

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Don’t Teach Them Facts – Let Student Discover Patterns

4794114114_dd895561bf Develop a classification system – analyze patterns, create a schema, evaluate where specific elements belong. Sounds like a very sophisticated exercise. Not really, young toddlers do it all the time – sorting out their toys and household stuff into groups of their own design. They may not be able to explain their thinking, but hand them another item and watch them purposely place it into one of their groups. They have designed a system.

Humans experience the world in patterns, continually trying to answer the question – what is this? Remembering where we’ve encountered things before and assessing new items for their similarities and differences. Someone once asked Picasso if it was difficult to draw a face. His reply, “it’s difficult not to draw one.” We see “faces” everywhere.

Filling out a Venn diagram isn’t analysis – it’s information filing.

It’s unfortunate that student don’t get to use their innate perceptual skills more often in the classroom. Instead of discovering patterns on their own, students are “taught” to memorize patterns developed by someone else. Rather than do the messy work of having to figure out what’s going on and how to group what they see – students are saddled with graphic organizers which take all the thinking out of the exercise. Filling out a Venn diagram isn’t analysis – it’s information filing. Instead of being given a variety of math problems to solve that require different problem-solving strategies, students are taught a specific  process then given ten versions of the same problem to solve for homework. No pattern recognition required here – all they have to do is simply keep applying the same procedures to new data sets. Isn’t that what spreadsheets are for?

Continue reading “Don’t Teach Them Facts – Let Student Discover Patterns”

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What Would Schools Look Like, If Students Designed the Schools?

Independent 4 As you watch this video, think about what could happen in schools, if adults got out of the way. 

You’ll hear students say things like,  ”A subject comes up that I don’t know about, and instead of glossing over it,  I truly find myself thinking was is that about? I could learn about it! I’m finding questions in everything.” And “We learned how to learn, we learned how to teach, we learned how to work.”

Of course, it’s easy to discount these kids as atypical. Marginalizing them is far easier than wondering why other high school students are stuck doing worksheets.

For more information on the project and associated lesson plans for students see:  ”Independence Day: Developing Self-Directed Learning Projects“

 

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Think All Journalism is Migrating to the Web? These Students Publish Hardcopy Newspaper

The-Fowl Or perhaps you think that high school students are unmotivated, unwilling to take on complex tasks and totally disinterested in anything that isn't digital?

Well these kids run counter to all these stereotypes and more.

Students at Bolder High School in Colorado are 3 issues into publishing their own "underground" newspaper. And they're producing "The Fowl" in old school manner – hard copy with hand drawn illustrations. No InDesign processing for them. As one of the student editors says – "People our age don't get heard that often, because we're not seen as that credible. But we have things to say that we're the only credible sources on."

As reported in the DailyCamera,

The eight-page February issue, adorned with a hand-drawn bird on the cover, includes an opinion piece on the real-life superhero movement, a rant about Valentine's Day, an ode to the Absolute Vinyl record store and a story about a new exhibit at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.

…The students lay out the pages by hand, make an initial copy at Kinkos and send it to a Denver printer to print 1,500 copies. They said the hours and hours it takes to produce the paper have been daunting, but worth it.
"It's just students writing for students, without any in-between man," said senior Tomas Hernando Kofman.

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Kids Explain 4 Strategies for Making Math Come Alive

During this summer program students entering eighth grade were coached by an intern in ways to investigate and talk about the math in their lives.  Here's the 4 strategies the students used: 

Math-alive 1. Look for math in real life – Nic ponders the permutations in picking out his clothes. 
2. Frame your experiences as word problems – Shanice eagerly monitors price changes in a coat she wants to buy. (Spoiler alert: she gets it!)
3. Try out different ways to solve problems. Nik crafts a way to determine his baseball batting average.
4. Explain and share your thinking. Shaniece describes what they do when one them gets stuck on a problem.

Watch the video to hear what they discovered in their own words. "I see math when I'm walking down the street…. I see math in myself."

For more information on the project click here.

Hat tip to Matt Karlsen