Monthly Archives: September 2015

A bicycle is an engineering marvel!

Posted on by
1

This week saw three important pieces of our fall work overlapping and developing together.

Bookshelves:

During one of our extended blocks, our learners worked closely with our building and engineering consultant Ross to start setting up their metal and wood for the bookshelves they’re designing. This mini engineering exploration is designed to give them the opportunity to work on scale drawings, design, feedback and iteration, and most importantly metalworking skills that they will need in order to do the larger project in transportation. The week before, they had moved their ideas from paper sketches to one quarter scale prototypes made out of foamcore, wood towels, and other appropriate materials. Now was their chance to learn how to work with the tools that allow metalwork to happen: reciprocal saws, grinders, welders, sanders to name a few. We unpackaged the new tools, and the students created guide sheets on the safety and proper operation of the tools that they shared and then posted in class.By the end of next week, all of their pieces should be cut and ready to be assembled into their design.
tools - 2

tools - 3

tools - 4

tools - 5

tools - 1

Motion/kinematics:

In order to develop the proper terminology in transportation, we are working towards better understanding motion, and the mathematics of linear and nonlinear relations (for example, when that object changes its speed, what are the mathematical models that govern that kind of behavior?). We’ve already developed baseline terminology and understanding of motion through looking at constant velocity, and this week we added a new motion to understand, what happens when an object changes its velocity? Students conducted an experiment on an inclined plane, and are collecting data to build mathematical models but they can use to create predictive models for motion that is much more complex. It was exciting to see some students already derive their mathematical models, and one group did a predictive analysis of how far their car would’ve gone if it continued in its motion for 60 seconds – it showed a wonderful connection between the models they were creating and the real world result of them. Terminology like friction, acceleration and terminal velocity came up in our conversations which is exactly where this experience was designed to lead us towards. Of course, this will lend itself to quadratic’s which are a key component of our Algebra 2 curriculum.

inclined - 1

inclined - 2

inclined - 3

Transportation/bicycles:

The biggest event of the week was our first trip to KVIBE ( Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange). We spent over three hours at their Kalihi facility with students getting a broad overview of the community outreach work that KVIBE does, and then we dove into the mechanics of bicycles under the excellent tutelage of Marcos, Galen, and Lorenzo. We did some work with naming of parts, but the key experience for students was understanding how the wheel (hub, spokes, rim) works and to take apart and reassemble the wheel hub – cleaning bearings in understanding the ways that it is put together to create a nearly frictionless rotational center for the wheel. In the process of explaining the mechanics of the bicycle, a large number of significant physics terminology came into our language – tension, torque, peer pressure, friction, statics… As they were explaining their work, Lorenzo commented with great emphasis “the bicycle is truly a marvel of engineering!”. Students worked with their teams, and were both collaborative and diligent in tackling the task of disassembling and reassembling wheels to better understand how they work, and the physics concepts underlying them.

All in all, it was rewarding to see our students tying together these three strands looking towards the broader goal of designing and sharing ideas about their learning with the community. Students have already talked about sharing their knowledge with other schools about how to repair bicycles, putting up instructional webpages about the values (health, environment, social connection) and giving examples of how to live a more sustainable lifestyle. It was an exciting week!

kvibe hubs - 6

kvibe hubs - 1

kvibe hubs - 2

kvibe hubs - 3

kvibe hubs - 4

kvibe hubs - 5
*** All of our photos for the year are kept on our Flickr page here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskiFvesE

Good Design, Good Projects

Posted on by
Reply

Good Design, Good Projects

I spent some time this weekend re-reading Dr David’s Merrill article “Pebble-in-the-Pond Model for Instructional Design” (http://www.ispi.org/archives/resources/Vol41_07_41.pdf). I count myself lucky to have been able to take a class from Dr. Merrill and consider him one of the great minds in instructional design. In the day-to-day lives of teachers, there is rarely the opportunity to do a complete instructional design process that is advocated by instructional designers, but the ideas he lays out in this wonderful summary are the same basic structures that we use when designing good projects.

One of my favorite parts of the article is the diagram that he uses to lay out the foundations of good whole problem design:

Phases of Effective Instruction

Phases of Effective Instruction

Dr. Merrill advocates for designers to first start with the whole problem – to both engage and immerse the learners in the “why we need to know”. In much the same way, when we design good projects, we need to back up and ask what’s the essential/driving question that will direct our focus, direct our learning explorations, and give us a reason for wanting to do this work. The next step is to “identify a progression of such problems of increasing difficulty or complexity such that if learners are able to do all of the whole tasks thus identified, they would have mastered the knowledge and skill to be taught.” In other words, we need to identify the scaffolded activities that will allow the learner to build the requisite knowledge and skills to understand how to solve the whole problem. Once we know that, we can provide activities and feedback to learners so they correctly learn and apply the skills and content knowledge they need in order to work towards the whole problem.

In our work in Mid-Pacific eXploratory (MPX) and the ways that we work with other teachers through Kupu Hou Academy (kupuhouacademy.com) our work mirrors much of that found in this good instructional design methodology and there is much to be continually learned in order to apply the best design of deeper learning practices around these essential “first principles of instruction”.

One of the things that this can lead to is moving away from teaching knowledge and skills as discrete items that we might use, and instead become necessary components that one must know in order to work on the whole problem. This year in our 10th grade class, we’ve been talking about ways that we can make a difference in the prevailing issue for this generation – climate change. In the areas of transportation and energy, there are things that we can do to have an impact. We started the year with visits to sustainable buildings and Hawaiian Electric, and are breaking down this big task into components that we need to understand in order to be knowledgeable and capable enough to propose possible solutions. That means understanding motion,energy and electricity, as well as understanding the mathematics of modeling and analysis. Those are the component skills that we are developing in order to propose and create solutions to help make a difference in the big issue of our generation. By anchoring our activities in the “need to know” we create a more powerful learning experience that will stay with learners far beyond the life of this course.

All models are wrong but some are useful

Posted on by
Reply

Rumination from MPX10 from the week of Aug 31
On the Values and challenge of models

As we explore and set our projects and experiences around the big theme of climate change this year in our 10th grade exploratory classes, I am continually designing into our experiences the important framework of modeling. It is no surprise to me that the latest versions of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Math framework in the common core (here) emphasize heavily the importance of the generation, exploration and elaboration of modeling, and more particularly mathematical modeling. When we ask learners to work with models, we push them to deepen, extend and anchor their understanding of relationships between variables: position and time, force and acceleration, parts per million of carbon and global average temperature, really any defined system of interest. 

In our class this week we have been working on the mathematics of linear expressions and the physics of Constant motion (broader target: developing the language and understanding an engineer needs for looking at transportation). As a means to deepen our understanding of the modeling of constant motion (broadly leaning of the work of the modeling pedagogy of ASU) we generated experimental data (position and time) of the motion of 2 battery powered cars that move at different speeds. From that data the students use a modeling tool (in our case the wonderful *free* Graphical Analysis App from vernier software http://www.vernier.com/products/software/ga-app/) to create a mathematical model for each car.

position time graphs for the two battery powered cars

position time graphs for the two battery powered cars


The culminating activity was a predictive model session. The students were given a scenario (the red car starts 7 seconds ahead of the green car) and needed to use their models and data to try and predict when the faster green car would catch the red car. The first pass at this activity generated a LOT of conversation, questions and difficulty for the students as they moved from superficial understanding to deeper meaning making.

Students brainstorming in teams

Students brainstorming in teams

This kind of learning in our class provides so many layers of learning. It challenges students to truly show they understand the models they have created. It gets to the heart of experimental  science in designing experiments that generate meaningful and reliable data. It requires students to be active – to analyze, explain, predict and defend their work. Importantly it starts to replace naive thinking of the real world with internally constructed models that real scientists use to observe and understand phenomena. Oh – and it is fun!
In the process of planning for our modeling I found a great quote from statistician George E. P. Box  “all models are wrong, but some are useful”.  In order to appreciate the power of this statement my goal is to nurture a real awareness and appreciation for modeling as well as its limitations.