New Toy

So, my students are taking their TNReady tests and I've had a little spare time this past week. What does one do with spare time? Create electronics, of course.... This week, I put together a noise level indicator for the classroom using some LED's, a breadboard, a microphone, and an Arduino Uno. I've actually improved on the design in the video and I may upload a new video with the new and improved version. Let me know what you think!

First Robotics Competition 2017

The Spartans had a great time this weekend in Huntsville, Al at the First Robotics Competition! The event was awesome and the accomplishments of these students is awe-inspiring. What these groups were able to design, build, and operate is nothing less than spectacular and I'm very happy to have been a part of it. Team Sparta Bots put everything that they had into this and I'm extremely proud of what they were able to do. They learned many lessons, overcame obstacles, and are hungry for more next year!

Huntsville here we come!

    I'm super excited to be heading to Huntsville, AL today for the First Robotics Competition with SpartaBots, Stratford STEM's robotics team. You can check out the competition here. It's been great helping these amazing students design and build their robot for this year's competition. I will have pictures of the even available soon! Wish us luck!

Use something they love to help them learn!

     Hello everyone! I know it's been a while since I've posted anything but times have been busy. I'm still in the process of getting photo release forms together so that I can add pictures of the students to the blog, but hopefully they will be here soon. Today, I wanted to talk about something that has been said plenty often enough but I haven't seen done as often as I'd like. This is taking something that students already know or love and including it in your instructional strategy. This is a major part in the theory courses taught to secondary educators and I can certainly see why it is stressed so much.

     Working with my current demographic, I find motivation and interest to be vital to getting students to buy-in to the lesson or take an active part in it. This means finding ways to make the students interested in something as thrilling as data collection. Luckily, I like to think outside the box and color outside the lines and I came up with idea that I believe the students really enjoyed and one that earned me a "that a boy" from my fellow faculty members. This was simply flipping bottles!

     If you haven't noted this craze, chances are you aren't around students who have access to a bottle that they can flip because they will... constantly! Here is a video that currently has over 53 million views on Youtube of guys flipping bottles:

     This craze has swept the globe for reasons that I can't fully understand but I know a winning horse when I see one. So, I decided to have the students do something they loved doing anyway, flip bottles! Luckily, I could sneak in a little education under the radar. The trick was to have students generate a legitimate experiment all while having fun. We proposed the test or initial observation, generated a hypothesis, collected data, analyzed the data, looked for sources or error and improvement, and finally graphed and shared our results. It was a great way to introduce the scientific method and basic data collection.

     This link will take you to a copy of the activity if you'd like to see it or use it in your own classroom. This link will take you to the graph that I used in place of the one you just visited. I had hopes of taking this into an Excel lesson and having the students compile all of their data into a single graph, but time didn't allow. All in all, the students enjoyed the lesson and showed definite improvement on their assessments of this content. I will definitely be bring this or an activity very similar back into my classroom.

2017 FIRST Robotics Competition

So, I'm super excited to be a part of the Sparta Bots team in this year's competition! I'm new to robotics but I have some experience with electrical/electronic systems and fabrication so I've managed to make myself useful so far lol. These kids are intelligent, creative, and motivated so I can't wait to see what we come up with in the next few weeks. I'll keep you posted ;)



Here's the competition intro video:

First lab day with the Spartans!

So, everyone keeps telling me not to keep staying so late, but how else am I supposed to get this stuff together? In all reality, I thoroughly enjoy setting things like this up for the kids. I know I might burn out if I'm not careful, but I'm determined to do the best I can to get these students involved and interested in science. My real concern is this: How many of these tools will operate correctly after 142 9th graders get their hands on them!? Lab day here we go!

Good news!

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