As today’s post, I wanted to expand a bit about this year’s amazing STEM Day Competition, which took place on November 17th. This was our fourth annual STEM Day.

The six events were centered around the theme: “Earthquakes, Hurricanes, & High School: How to Survive These & Other Natural Disasters”. We tried to tie in each event to some of the craziness we’ve experienced this fall, from the strongest earthquake I’ve ever felt, to Hurricane Irene, to tornadoes, and related power losses and flooding. For example, your plane hits a tornado, and you must design a protective container to safely drop you and a friend to the ground (double egg drop). Or you create a zip-line vehicle to help people escape an incoming flood. We even tried to create a storyline to the events! After all the natural disasters, you design a rocket that will transport you away from all the catastrophes happening on Earth and allow you to begin a new life on Mars .

A student team working on their balloon-powered zipline car

The entire events description is here.

This was our largest event ever! Almost 120 students participated as competitors, in teams of 4. And more were helpers. As comparison, when we started this three years ago, we had 40 student competitors. We also invited teams from other schools to participate in STEM Day, and two other high schools and a middle school took part. Check out this write-up by one of our students in the school newspaper!

Hallway packed with students excited about STEM - even more are through the double doors at the end, and more still are in a classroom for an event!

It was also the most disorganized of any STEM Competition. We’re always running around a bit that morning to make sure things are set up and prepared. But it was moreso this time, in large part due to the great number of participants.

A couple things to make the day bittersweet. And to remind me that there are people (outside my school) I shouldn’t count on. One person had talked a big talk about sharing a bus among several outside schools we had invited to our STEM Competition. But then backed out at the last minute. Several more schools could have joined us today had that idea been followed through on. Another person, at the central office, had talked about sending various people: from their department, to the chief academic officer, to the school system’s cable access channel video crew.  This would have been a great way to publicize the great things happening at our school. But none of that materialized.

Still, we had amazing support from both the school community and from our industry & higher education partners. Our principal came down and saw what students were doing, and helped for a while with the rocket launching. Many teachers donated an hour out of their planning periods to help judge an event. Photographers from the yearbook and newspaper came down. A video team was sent by the chair of our industry advisory board and his engineering company. Many professional engineers (from local engineering firms, from nearby colleges and universities, and from government) and other community partners spent the whole day helping us as judges. So, all in all, it was a great success!

And, personally, I’d just like to add that I love my job because we get to do things like this! Planning and organizing a STEM Day each year is stressful but also awesome. Plus, I get to wear a silly hat!

Me on STEM Day, 17 Nov 2011

I am a firm believer that PD needs to be much more self-directed to be effective. We, as teachers, are professionals. As such, we can be trusted to work toward our own professional growth.

I get so much out of reading blogs by and tweeting with other math teachers–including lesson ideas, projects, worksheets, innovative techniques, clear explanations, and feedback on my ideas. Mythagon does a great job explaining the value of the math blogging/tweeting community here. The engineering education community is smaller, but I’ve worked to create and find spaces for that collaboration to occur as well, including by creating an online course to share resources with other engineering teachers in Baltimore City, and by starting this very blog.

In an official PD Day setting, where teachers have school but kids don’t, what could a more self-directed PD look like? It could include time to develop and grow a virtual professional learning community (blogs, twitter, as described above). It could include time to collaborate with other teachers in the building or district, self-selecting colleagues in your subject area or outside it, and deciding as a group what topics need to be discussed. It could include a variety of seminars/presentations, each led by teachers, of which you can pick which ones to attend that you need the most development in.

The best PD is that which I can use in the classroom the next day or week or month. Some of the best days of PD for me personally have come from a series of workshops organized specifically for PLTW engineering teachers, through the Community College of Baltimore County and the Time Center. They’ve been offering these trainings for the past several years, and recently received an NSF grant to expand their ongoing-PD model to other schools and states across the country.

Crane, built from FischerTechnik parts and programmed via RoboPro

I attended one of these PD’s a few weeks ago about using and programming with FischerTechniks and RoboPro. We learned advanced programming techniques (variables, subroutines, displays, inputs/outputs, commands & operators, branches and wait fors). We applied some of these techniques to arithmetic operations, and some to operating the crane you see above.

For the second half of the day, we had time to complete a project of our own choosing. I needed some help and practice time with pneumatics, as they were not part of my original training in the Principles of Engineering and Computer Integrated Manufacturing courses but have since been added to the curriculum in both. To use the new curricula, we had to purchase supplemental kits, since our FischerTechnik kits did not come with pneumatic components. So this was still pretty new to me, and I really valued the time I had to explore, learn, and get help from both the professor and a teacher-classmate. We built the simple pneumatic system you see below, which will store compressed air in the tank using a motor and cylinder pump system, then convert the pressurized air to vertical or lateral motion. This has been especially useful, since I’ve been using the instructional resources provided that day, plus my greater understanding of this topic, to teach pneumatics and fluid power to my CIM students this week!

Our pneumatic system

I shall be attending another PD this Friday at CCBC to improve my skills in using Autodesk Inventor, a 3D modeling software.

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It’s down to the home stretch for both Mustaches For Kids and #NaBloPoMo!

Please support my moustache & Baltimore students by donating at DonorsChoose via my page. Plus, if you give now, you can use the codeword JOLLY and have your donation matched!

Also please support my partners in Baltimore’s NaBloPoMo by visiting and commenting at their blogs:

• Surviving the System
• BmoreSchools
• Epiphany in Baltimore
• The Smallest Twine

Only one day left in November – we’re almost through!

Patterson High School’s Academy of Engineering (AOE) would like to begin a multi-level mentoring program for our students. We plan to bring in outside engineers from industry to work with our students at every grade level. We’d also like to have several of our seniors and juniors mentor the students just entering our program, at the ninth and tenth grade level. The mentoring setup will include a once-monthly meeting, to include 1 industry mentor, 1 peer-to-peer student mentor, and 6 mentees. The meeting will vary month to month, but will include STEM-themed hands-on activities, discussions of what it takes to succeed in AOE, discussions of what it takes to succeed beyond high school in the engineering field, tips for college applications, advice on student innovative projects, and a luncheon / awards ceremony.

Any advice, things to add, things to change?

With budgets being cut more and more each year, it seems like grant writing is becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life. Last year I applied (either individually or with another teacher) for four grants: PLTW Innova Grant, NACME STEM Innovation Grant, AIAA Educator Grant, and SME-EF CIM Upgrade Grant. We received funds from the latter three, which helped pay for a bus, supplies for STEM Competitions, a rocket launcher, and upgrades to new equipment for my CIM course.

Still, even with these grants, we are working with a smaller budget than ever before. With declining enrollment at the school (though the engineering program is still growing), and education cuts across the board due to the economy, we have less money budgeted to support our programs than years prior. And, so, we’re looking for grants to apply for, like the one above. Any great ones out there that I should know about?

Speaking of fundraising and grants for classroom projects, there are only three days left to donate to my Mustaches For Kids Donors Choose page. On it, I’ve selected several grant proposals from my school and from other Baltimore City Schools that I think are important and worthwhile. The fundraising drive ends with the month of November. Please give today, whether it’s $5 or $25, to support my mustache and our kids’ education.

Almost through the mustache month!

I did manage an 8-hour day on Wednesday (go me!). But rather than travel a long distance that afternoon after a full day of work, probably with lots of traffic, I took a longish nap and then drove up to visit with family Thanksgiving morning. Here’s the sun rising on Thanksgiving day, from somewhere in Pennsylvania:

Thanksgiving Sunrise

After visiting family and friends in Massachusetts and New York, I headed back to Baltimore. Driving back, I took U.S. Route 11 rather than I-81, to see more interesting sights than the interstate had to offer. [For context, see also: my trip on US 20 and this post about driving.] I have taken 11 before on occasion, but I saw some new things today.

U.S. 11 goes through downtown Binghamton, where I saw Occupy protesters camped out in tents.

Occupy Binghamton

I saw the Tunkhannock Viaduct, an amazingly tall and massive railroad bridge.

Tunkhannock Viaduct, northeast PA

For much of its length in Pennsylvania, Route 11 travels along the Susquehanna River or its tributary the Lackawanna River. Here’s a view of the Susquehanna, though not actually from U.S. 11, but instead from New York Route 7, east of Binghamton.

Susquehanna River, Nineveh, NY

I traveled along Highway 11 , from Binghamton, to Scranton, to Harrisburg. There I joined I-83 into Baltimore.

And now I’m back home! A few more pictures are here. Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

A few details on some topics we’ve worked on during the past month or so:

The lesson on three-dimensional polyhedra went fairly well for the first two parts. Students constructed polyhedra from nets and by building their skeletons out of gumdrops (vertices) and toothpicks (edges). They discovered the relationship between vertices, edges, and faces found by Euler (V+F=E+2). But when I tried to bring the whole class to proving that only five regular polyhedra exist, I lost 80% of the class. I don’t know if it was too many steps, too long for their attention spans, an aversion to the logic of proofs, or the overall class dynamic. I don’t believe the math was too complicated for them (it just has to do with angles in regular polygons, spatial relationships, and our previous topic – tilings of the plane). I provided a sheet for taking guided notes. But much of the class turned that sheet in without having taken any notes.

Some of the more successful lessons have been a few that tied into what my students were learning in their engineering class. In late October – early November, my sophomore Geometry students were building and analyzing truss bridges in their Principles of Engineering course. Several teachers got together to plan lessons in various subjects that tie into the topic of bridges. In October, near the beginning of that unit, I did a lesson on the strength of various shapes. Students tried to use paper to hold the most books at least one inch off the table. They constructed a bridge that could hold the most rolls of pennies, using just one index card. And another bridge of multiple index cards, designed for length.

A couple weeks later, after they had developed designs in the engineering class, I had them analyze some of the geometry of triangles. This connected their bridges to what we were currently talking about in Geometry, with triangle congruence, proof, naming, and the Pythagorean Theorem.

Bridge Geometryhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/73632593/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-1xgwxwz3mcqb0iig9brt//

We’ve also learned about isosceles triangles, angle relationships, and circles in the past month.

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Reminders: Please support my moustache & Baltimore students by donating, and please support my partners in Baltimore’s NaBloPoMo by visiting and commenting:

• Surviving the System
• BmoreSchools
• Epiphany in Baltimore
• The Smallest Twine

CNC Programming and Mill Use

CNC-Milled Initials, Fall 2011

To complete this project, students first designed their initials (out of straight lines and arcs), plotted points’ coordinates, learned how to operate the CNC Mill properly and safely, programmed in G&M Code, troubleshot their problems via a code verification software, and then milled their blocks.

Robotic Arm Programming & Use

Robotic Arm, Stacking Three Blocks, Fall 2011 - Could still use a little adjustment on block alignment

For the robotic arm, students work through a scaffolded sequence of activities: from programming the arm to pick up and move a block, to the difference between recording and teaching positions, to stacking three cylinders, to stacking three cubes using trigonometrically-calculated roll angles, to moving the robot linearly vs. circularly vs. by joint, to using variables and loops, to using inputs and outputs, to using variables and loops and subroutines and inputs and outputs simultaneously. In addition, we look at the history of robotics and automation, and learn the parts and types of robotic arms.

Robotic Arm, Circular & Linear Motion, Spelling Out Letters - It was very difficult to get the right grip on the marker so it was the right height and didn't angle itself upon contact with the paper

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Reminders: Please support my moustache & Baltimore students by donating, and please support my partners in Baltimore’s NaBloPoMo by visiting and commenting:

• Surviving the System
• BmoreSchools
• Epiphany in Baltimore
• The Smallest Twine

A few students who came today said they weren’t doing anything in other classes, why am I making them do work? I wish that, like other school systems, we had today off. Or at least a half day, like other systems. But if we are here and have school, it is a normal day of lessons: we are learning new things, and the work we are doing is important. I try to emphasize that to students in my explanations, as well as show by example.

In Geometry, we completed an exploration into how to construct a circle that goes through three predetermined points. This is one of the top three skills related to circles that we learn. Those who finished early played a game of polygon capture. In the small setting, I was able to really push their thinking about why certain things were true (i.e. proofs of what/how we were constructing circles).

In CIM, we reviewed reading programs that control a robotic arm, worked on analyzing them critically, both answering questions and filling in missing parts of a program. This is a skill vital to their understanding of the work we do in the class (reading, writing, and analyzing programs of different types is probably 75% of the course material) and therefore also important to the final exam that can help them earn college credit for their engineering coursework while still in high school. After that, students added to their online portfolios.

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Reminders: Please support my moustache & Baltimore students by donating, and please support my partners in Baltimore’s NaBloPoMo by visiting and commenting:

• Surviving the System
• BmoreSchools
• Epiphany in Baltimore
• The Smallest Twine

Encouraged by some of the feedback from our site visit. We have continued to make progress as an AOE in all four areas (academy development, curriculum/instruction, advisory board, & work-based learning). We’ve put a lot of pieces in place that are helping our students. Still have more work to do in every area, but solid progress has occurred. Some is thanks to me, but much is thanks to our awesome team of teachers, or thanks to our terrific industry partners.

While impressed with that progress, the major piece that is still not in place is the AOE as a small learning community within the larger high school. With common planning time built into the school day for our AOE teachers (by grade). Including a pure academy model where students stay with academy teachers for all subjects and don’t go to other academies except for electives or rare offerings (e.g. AP calculus). Not because other academies’ teachers suck, but because our AOE teachers will collaborate and make connections around engineering, and because our AOE teachers will meet and collaborate around improving education for our shared students. Right now there is lots of cross-academy teaching, which doesn’t fit in with the AOE model.

If this were to fall into place, it would make much of what we are doing for AOE so much easier, and make some things possible that are not currently possible. With the new principal and new leadership team, today was really their first in-depth introduction about the goals of the NAF/AOE model. So here’s hoping that we will have a commitment to work along these lines for next year.

Anyway, I apologize for errors of grammar and sentence fragments and such. I usually proofread for you, but not tonight. Need some sleep now. :^)

Today I spent the bulk of my time preparing for tomorrow’s visit from the National Academy Foundation. They will be evaluating our progress and helping us develop a plan to keep our Academy of Engineering moving forward this year. I made some nice graphs out of data, circulated some talking points, created new sections for our AOE binder, and added items to those sections. I printed, punched holes, & put away. I typed up some notes that I hadn’t gotten around to for weeks. And I prepared some folders to hand out to our guests.

Anyway, though I don’t have the energy for a long and thoughtful post, do go over and check out the amazing A BCPSS Parent who writes Surviving the System. Send some words of encouragement that way, as A BCPSS Parent has managed to post every single day in #NaBloPoMo November so far! And, though a day or two may have been missed here or there, also check out the awesome bloggers at BmoreSchools, Epiphany in Baltimore, & The Smallest Twine who are hanging in with lots of posts this month!

Also, here’s a photo of me, three weeks into Mustaches for Kids month:

Without a smile, do I look a little bit like Baltimore’s own Edgar A Poe? No, maybe not.

Oh well, click this link or the mustachioed crab at right to support educational supplies for Bmore’s kids!