Following the Labor Day Holiday

Last week was a little quieter here. Students were working on their project proposals this week. I did receive many great questions regarding the wide variety of projects. Some of the potential projects this year include: a claw machine (similar to the ones played at arcades), 3D printed home-made fidget spinners, a vending machine, an electric motor powered bicycle, 3D printed prostheses, and an arcade game (home-made).

It is quite interesting listening to the students when the talk about how they are going to go about building their ideas. I find it fascinating when I ask them to come up with a budget and they realize that most items cost much more than what they think! 

Here is one group brainstorming this morning!

On another note, our professional development for the year is off to a great start! We have many teachers who have already earned multiple badges! BadgeList.com has been a great host site for our professional development this year. We are continually adding badges as we go, asking for input from the faculty for more badges, and giving many opportunities for everyone to grow! Thus far, we have collectively earned 194 badges. Pretty good start to the year!

Week 1 In the Books!

This week, I had my students working a few different things. Students that are returning to my classes for a second or third year (taking Honors Engineering, Honors 3D Printing, etc) started working on their project proposals for the year. Each group of students must come up with an idea for a project that they can build. It can be just about anything, and I encourage them to be creative; look for new ways to do things, look for ways to make improvements on existing products, and overall, how can their project add something to the community or be relevant to the world?

My new students, taking Honors Tech and Design Thinking, learned how to use the 3D printer on Tuesday, and on Thursday went through the Stanford D-School Virtual Crash Course. I love this exercise for the students. I love this exercise for me! It helps teach my students how to become a design thinker, think like a creator or producer and not like a consumer. In this world, we are so consumer driven, that is how most of us think. I want my students to think like designers, like producers, like entrepreneurs. It also helps remind me of how to think like a designer and not a consumer. This was not easy for them, and I really love how it presented them with challenges to how they think!

My students sharing their new points of view with each other!

Starting Another New School Year!

Last week Wednesday, I started my 5th year at The Oakridge School! I am excited with what the new school year brings!

Over the last 2 years, I served as both the chair of a Research and Design Committee to explore block scheduling for our school, and served on the implementation committee to bring our block schedule to fruition. So, this year we started with what we are calling our Customized Block Schedule. It truly is customized to be very Oakridge, and meet the needs of our students. The single biggest driving factor on both committees was, how can we best serve our students, what is best for our students? We knew as a faculty, this may mean more duties for us, and we are meeting this challenge to give our students the best experience possible!

This past spring I was presented with another leadership opportunity by our administration, to be a member of the professional development committee for the next 2 years. I accepted! I am extremely excited to be on this committee and help our community of teachers get more professional development.  As a committee, we were thinking about the different options that are available to us for professional development, and we developed a theme: We Serve. We serve our students, our parents, our faculty and staff colleagues, our community, and ourselves. We then explored platforms that we could use to mark professional development achievements. We decided to go with Badge List. Badge List is a platform that allows for organizations to create and earn badges based on what micro-credentials that organization wants to set. We realized we needed a platform that would serve both faculty and staff members, not just one or the other.  We also wanted a platform that we could individualize the professional development to each person's needs, or each department's needs, or each division's needs. Badge List is easy to use and also very versatile!

We are still in the infancy of using Badge List. We just rolled it out to our faculty and staff on Friday of last week. So far, we have a lot of teachers who are earning multiple badges! It is very exciting to see this buy-in!  One teacher has already earned 10 badges! I love that there is such a variety of different ways to make professional development fun!

Here are a couple of photos from Day 1 of 2 of my Tech classes!

Our Brains and Podcasts

Each week, I enjoy listening to a podcast from the Freakonomics.com website.  Freakonomics had a podcast from October about the neuroscience behind your brain when you listen to podcasts.  I went back and re-listened to this podcast for the November/December challenge our tech team at school is doing.

I'll throw out the gist of the podcast, we should be listening to more podcasts!  This is also an area of improvement that I would like to focus on this year, find more educational podcasts to listen to on a weekly basis to expand my knowledge as an educator and continue my own education.  Podcasts are a great way to get a lot of information in a relatively short period of time, and do it in a way in which our brains think we are listening to a story being told. Now, the story teller (podcaster) needs to be good at what they do, a monotone, uninspired podcaster will not do much to stimulate my senses, while a charismatic, interesting and involved podcaster will get me to buy into the story, both emotionally and mentally.

Our brains enjoy stories!  Imagine that, we like listening to stories, and podcasts put information into a very narrative form and thus, makes the information enjoyable to listen to and stimulates our brains. Neuroscientists are always studying what is going on in the brain, and new fMRI technology gives us a small insight into what is going on when we are responding to stimuli.  Our brain is both fixed, and yet impressively flexible system, that is always making new neuroconnections. 

After listening to this podcast (story) about why we should be listening to more podcasts, it made me want to listen to more podcasts, lol!  Podcasts make our brain hum mysterious and delightful, so let's start humming!

Reflections on Reaching All Students

As my students work on their projects, I have the good fortune of being able to reflect a little bit on where they started and where they are now.  I am constantly amazed at how creative, insightful, and hard working my students are, and this comes through in how far they have come with their projects this semester. 

We have all heard about the student or two in each class who are the 'hard to reach' students. Whether it is math, science, or English, sometimes these core classes are not where every student shines, even though they are smart! As teachers we struggle to reach those students who we know have greatness in them, but it has not yet manifested itself in their grades. How do we reach these students? How do we give them opportunities to excel in the classroom?

It may be that the Makerspace or Maker class is where these students can shine brighter than you ever thought. As I see my students working on their projects, I see the intensity, the dedication, the ingenuity, and the intelligence that they may not be able to demonstrate in the typical classroom, but in my classroom, the Makerspace, they excel!  I am very humbled that I have been able to reach theses students, to see them use math, science, and other core subjects in making their projects.  Is it traditional pen on paper writing of algebra or geometry problems? No, it is not. It is making. It is doing. It is hands on using geometry to figure what angles their materials need to be cut at. It is using algebra and calculus to figure out dimensions and angular rotations of pieces they need to assemble. It is using design thinking to determine whether or not their prototype is what they intended it to be, testing it, and then making a new iteration better than the last.

I humbly take some pride in knowing that I have reached some of the students who may otherwise not 'shine' in the typical classroom, are excelling in mine. It is a great feeling!

Project Updates

After having a couple of weeks to work on their projects, my students are coming along quite nicely on what they set out to accomplish. As they have been working on their projects, I am constantly asking them why they are doing what they are doing. I do this so that I know they understand each step in the process, and this also allows me to help with any confusion they may have. In their weekly blog posts, I ask them to reflect on what they did that week, and as an example, I am doing that myself.

I was challenged by the Director of Modern Learning to model to my students, a project of my own, the steps needed to complete the project, and reflections on the project. I chose to build a set of dog stairs for my 2 pugs. My oldest pug is 9 1/2 years old and my youngest is 7 1/2.  My 9 1/2 year old pug, she is a sweetheart, and with older age, she is having trouble jumping up and down off the sofa. In order for her to not injure herself, I thought, why not build a set of stairs to make it easier for her to get up onto the sofa she enjoys so much.


I started by measuring the height of the sofa, from floor to the top of the cushion, approximately 18 inches. I then did some research to see if anyone else had constructed 18 inch high dog stairs. Of course, someone has done this before, and I decided to use their template and replicate the set of stairs they made. You can see the plans here.

I measured out all of the cuts of the wood that I needed to make prior to doing any cutting. As my father told me when I was young, measure twice and cut once, so I did. I even measured a third time to make sure my markings were spot on.

I then cut all of the pieces of wood according to the template and nailed and glued them down according to the template. Some pictures, and I should have taken some before I got this far, and I plan to on my next project, to take more pictures sooner, and at more frequent time points.


The finished product:

Front                                                                              Back

Now, for some closer ups, and as you'll see, my cutting wasn't quite as straight as I thought it was. From this I learned that I should use a miter saw and not a hand held circular saw for more of the cuts.

                                                         Just a little off on this one, lol!

                                                         A little wood glue will fix this!

All in all, I would call it a successful build; however, I am going to try and put wood glue in the cracks, vise clamp it together, and compress the daylights out of it and see if I can't get everything to come together tightly.  Some take aways from this project: 1) I learned that pictures along the way would have been very helpful, and I need to take more of them at more frequent time points, 2) even though I had a template to go off of, the actual product will differ from what the pictures look like, 3) use more precise tools, such as a miter saw for more precise cuts, hand held tools run the risk of human error, and I could see this as the wood steps did not line up exactly with the cleats, 4) modeling a project for my students and empathizing with what they are going through on a daily basis is tiring! I had a great time constructing the stairs, and I hope my students are having just as much fun with their projects!

Updates from the Grant Presentations

It was decided that all of the grant proposal presentations were worth funding!  I am extremely excited about this!  My students came up with great project ideas and were able to convey them in a manner that brought their creativity and ingenuity forward.  This was an interesting process. I asked my students to initially come up with an idea for a project that they wanted to build, and it had to be something they could build, whether it be a website, an app, or something more tangible like an arcade machine, etc.  Each student received a copy of a grant proposal that I wrote while in graduate school; although I was not expecting my students to write something as long or in depth as I did, I did expect a certain level of detail from them. I pushed my students to think critically about the project they were going to propose; what materials will they need, how much do those materials cost, where are the materials going to come from, how long will it take them to build their project, what are their anticipated results, and what are some anticipated improvements they could see making in their next iteration?  All questions that students had some trouble with initially because many of them never have had to think about a budget or a timeline. I really enjoyed seeing them work on the proposals and struggle a bit. The timeline they had to come up with, in my humble opinion, added another level of accountability to their projects. It is something I can hold them to and let them know that this is what they said they are/were going to have accomplished by a certain date. Now that we are in the initial building phase of many of their projects, I asked many of the me for cardboard prototypes first, before we purchase the other more expensive materials, because I want to see how they work with each other, and for them, it will give them a sense of how things do not always go as planned when prototyping. I feel it will give them the chance to iterate several times before they decide on a final plan. I am also asking them to continue to evaluate their process as they move along; are they working efficiently, is there a better way to construct something, etc?


A sampling of some of the projects that are getting started:

A group of students are working on constructing their own virtual reality app!  The requested a BoBo VR Z4 headset and we received it yesterday. The kids had some great reactions when they put the headset on for the first time.

One group of students are creating a mobile arcade machine using a Raspberry Pi. They are working on their cardboard prototype in the photo below.

I have one student working on creating a 3D printed 8 iron head of a golf club. He would like to see if the head of the club could actually be used to hit a golf ball and set some lofty goals for how far he would like to see the ball go; 100 - 130 yards!

Another group of students are working on a challenge that I issued to my classes; to construct from scratch their very own bag toss game (aka Cornhole). They started by learning how to use a miter saw to cut some 2 x 4s.