Skip to main content

Home/ MVIFI Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation/ Group items tagged engineering

Rss Feed Group items tagged

T.J. Edwards

How Engineering Class in 9th Grade Can Excite Diverse Learners | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • Engineering has been getting a lot of attention because of its real-world applications and clear job prospects, but learning to think like an engineer could be useful no matter what students decide to pursue for work
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      Not making engineers....learning to think like
  • all ninth-graders
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      What if Ted was required for all?
  • I felt like I didn’t know how to make enough stuff,”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Pilla worked as a mechanical engineer at Lockheed Martin before switching to teaching. “I didn’t have enough experience working on and planning out a really big project,”
  • That’s what he tries to give his students in high school.
  • When students newer to making come in excited to take on a project, the old hands help them get up to speed on the skills. And a lot of those projects are about improving the school itself.
  • Tiarra Bell, a senior at SLA Center City. Design drew her into engineering. She experimented with architecture and industrial design, but has really become passionate about furniture design. She now makes and sells her own furniture.
  • Kamal and Pilla meet with an advisory group of engineering industry professionals periodically to make sure their program is truly equipping students with the skills they’ll need to go into these fields later
  • The experts say students need to be able to write, to find problems, to communicate, to Google, to understand constraints. They need to be creative, take thoughtful risks and have a “fearlessness to leap.
  • robotics, senior engineering, astronomy and space sciences, MakerSpace, electronics and programming)
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      Seems like a lot. Too many choices?
  • To me it’s not about becoming an engineer in college or after. It’s about the critical thinking and the challenges and the creativity that comes with it,”
T.J. Edwards

PBL, STEAM, & CTE: Validation through Triangulation | Blog | Project Based Learning | BIE - 0 views

  • identifying ways that STEAM, CTE, and PBL have a unique three-way symbiotic relationship
  • So, with CTE, one or more of the STE(A)M subjects naturally is embedded within it, especially when applied to key knowledge, understanding, & success skills. Sound familiar? That’s the focus at the center of Gold Standard PBL! So what about the Essential Project Design Elements of PBL as applying STE(A)M within CTE?
  • what if an Engineering and Architecture Pathway student was asked to use CAD to design a home using passive solar construction techniques, much like the Anasazi did before electricity and indoor plumbing?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Integrating CTE and STE(A)M in this manner raises the bar to the rigorous level of PBL.
  • Then I realized that all of the CTE industry sectors have these same standards, so they apply to STE(A)M and PBL in the same manner as the example above from Architecture and Engineering.
  •  
    Makes me happy that Career Tech is mentioned as a vehicle for more rigorous PBL and STEAM and not as a program for "underachievers"
Bo Adams

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 0 views

  • But what are they betting on? AltSchool is a decidedly Bay Area experiment with an educational philosophy known as student-centered learning. The approach, which many schools have adopted, holds that kids should pursue their own interests, at their own pace. To that, however, AltSchool mixes in loads of technology to manage the chaos, and tops it all off with a staff of forward-thinking teachers set free to custom-teach to each student. The result, they fervently say, is a superior educational experience.
  • heir own weekly “playlists,” queues of individual and group activities tailored to the specific strengths and weaknesses of each kid.
  • This puts AltSchool at the intersection of two rapidly growing movements in education. Along one axis are the dozens of edtech startups building apps for schools; along the other are the dozens of progressive schools rallying around the increasingly popular concept of personalized education. The difference is: AltSchool is not just building apps or building schools. It’s doing both. In that way, AltSchools are more than just schools. They’re mini-research and development labs, where both teachers and engineers are diligently developing the formula for a 21st century education, all in hopes of applying that formula not only to other AltSchools, but to private, public, and charter schools across the country.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • obsession with constant feedback
  • Ventilla likes to call AltSchool’s approach to teaching “Montessori 2.0.” The Montessori method emphasizes letting kids learn primarily through independent projects rather than direct instruction.
  • AltSchool has built a digital platform, called My.Altschool
  • “We think assessment can be much less invasive and much more accurate when you’re collecting data from many sources.”
  • The team is also working on a recommendation engine for teachers, not unlike those used by companies like Amazon and Netflix. This tool would take into account everything that My.Altschool knows about a student—from her playlist history to how she learns best to what her strengths and weaknesses are—to recommend activities. “It’d be great if the system could figure out that Johnny’s an auditory learner, who loves castles, and that he’s struggling with estimating,” Bhatia says, adding that an early version of that tool will likely be available this year.
  • Once these tools have been validated within the AltSchool environment, Ventilla’s goal is to bundle them up into what he calls an “operating system for a 21st century education” and license them to the education system at large.
  •  
    HT @MikeyCanup
Bo Adams

American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn't Exist | WIRED - 0 views

  • Culture labs conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs.
  • The culture lab is the latest indication that learning is changing in America. It cannot happen too fast.
  • The time is now to support the role of learning in the pursuit of discovery and to embrace the powerful agency of culture.
Bo Adams

We overvalue innovation and entrepreneurship: Shifting the focus to Maintenance over Fa... - 0 views

  •  
    HT @occam98 Interesting!
Bo Adams

The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education - Education Week - 0 views

  • data scientists would then search the waters for patterns in each student's engagement level, moods, use of classroom resources, social habits, language and vocabulary use, attention span, academic performance, and more.
  • would be fed to teachers, parents, and students via AltSchool's digital learning platform and mobile app, which are currently being tested
  • AltSchool's 50-plus engineers, data scientists, and developers are designing tools that could be available to other schools by the 2018-19 school year.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • AltSchool is almost certain to provoke a backlash from parents and privacy advocates who see in its plans the potential for an Orwellian surveillance nightmare, as well as potentially unethical experimentation on children.
  • The term "big data" is generally used to describe data sets so large they must be analyzed by computers. Usually, the purpose is to find patterns and connections relating to human behavior and how complex systems function.
  • Analytics generally refers to the process of collecting such data, conducting those analyses, generating corresponding insights, and using that new information to make (what proponents hope will be) smarter decisions.
  • replacing the top-down, slow-moving bureaucratic structures that currently shape public education with a "networked model" in which students, teachers, and schools are connected directly by information and thus capable of learning and adapting more quickly.
  • 'Montessori 2.0': a kind of supercharged version of the progressive, project-based learning often found in elite private schools and privileged enclaves within traditional school systems.
  •  
    Eventually, Ventilla envisions AltSchool technology facilitating an exponential increase in the amount of information collected on students in school, all in service of expanding the hands-on, project-based model of learning in place at the six private school campuses the company currently operates in Silicon Valley and New York City.
T.J. Edwards

When Everyone Is Doing Design Thinking, Is It Still a Competitive Advantage? - 1 views

  • Design thinking has come a long way since I wrote about it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world places design at the center of everything it does. Designers are on the founding team of countless disruptive startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build more nimbly with a human-centered focus. Now that design thinking is everywhere, it’s tempting to simply declare it dead—to ordain something new in its place. It’s a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of tools that can grow old with us.
  • And I’d argue that in order to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.
  • Umpqua
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      A favorite DT story. It is a central chapter in Glimmer by Warren Berger.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • UK’s Design Policy Unit
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      This is an incredible document. UK's comprehensive Tech+Design curriculum work has been a favorite of mine to follow. This doc, though, shows a larger scale transformation using design. Worth considering for MVx
  • Company evangelists handed out Moleskines with tips on “how to be better-makers,” and an internal tool (built on IDEO’s OI Engine) helps teams master design thinking through open-platform challenges.
  • Design thinking even shows up in the questions asked during reviews, when employees are evaluated on how successfully they’re building its principles into everyday work.
  • Getting to that kind of mastery is our challenge for the next decade. How might organizations build deep design thinking skills and creative leadership at all levels?
  • host of resources
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      Can MVIFI be added to this list? A void/need to be filled?
  • That’s not an inborn ability, it’s a skill—OK, a mastery—learned over many years of doing
Meghan Cureton

Why A School's Master Schedule Is A Powerful Enabler of Change | MindShift | KQED News - 2 views

  • He and a team of teachers set out to try to reconfigure how this big high school could structurally put student relationships with teachers at the center, and value mastery of content above all else.
  • ‘If we don’t match our minutes to our mission, [teachers are] not going to shift.’
  • biggest obstacles to instructional changes of the sort Smith and his team were trying to engineer was the school schedule itself.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Our schedule is a function of what we’re trying to create
  • It’s sloppy, but hell, life is sloppy
  • They started with ninth grade
  • Changing is hard and when people get tired they will want to return to the status quo.
  • many schools start a school transformation project with energy and vigor, but when leaders run into outside pressures from the district or can’t pick their way through the complex system they run out of momentum.
  • That’s why it’s important not to toss away good teaching practices just because they’ve been around for years.
  • He doesn’t want it to become orderly because that’s not the natural state of human systems.
  • Individual success stories of students are what help keep him going.
Bo Adams

The Teacher's Lens: You are What You Do: Maker Empowerment of Voice - 0 views

  • Dewey wrote about knowledge as a verb, an action upon one’s environment.
  • creating Makers that view the world as malleable, not just through products and goods, but in social-political-economic systems
  • ...make sure there is space for students to find problems
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The carpenter, muralist, entrepreneur networks through a guild-like web where knowledge moves through dispersed nodes
  • No one ever explained why we needed four-tops, but maybe intuitively I knew that these watering holes were critical for the social construction of knowledge
  • learning IS a project that transcends the self and our role as learning engineers, designers, artisans, atelieristas is to create the environment for this empowerment.
  •  
    HT @eijunkie
Meghan Cureton

Why I Don't Grade | Jesse Stommel - 2 views

  • grades are the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education.
  • Agency, dialogue, self-actualization, and social justice are not possible in a hierarchical system that pits teachers against students and encourages competition by ranking students against one another.
  • Certainly, metacognition, and the ability to self-assess, must be developed, but I see it as one of the most important skills we can teach in any educational environment.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • You should consider this course a “busy-work-free zone.” If an assignment does not feel productive, we can find ways to modify, remix, or repurpose the instructions.
  • I find it strange that teachers and institutions would pre-determine outcomes before students even arrive upon the scene.
  • As educators, we have helped build (or are complicit in) a system that creates a great deal of pressure around grades. We shouldn't blame (or worse, degrade) students for the failures of that system.
  • Authentic feedback (and evaluation) means honoring subjectivity and requires that we show up as our full selves, both teachers and learners, to the work of education. Grades can't be “normed” if we recognize the complexity of learners and learning contexts. Bias can't be accounted for unless we acknowledge it.
  • Because I put myself outside of the grading loop, I can focus all my efforts on feedback and encouragement — on teaching, not grading.” Which leads me to wonder whether “graded participation” is actually an oxymoron. We can't participate authentically, can't dialogue, without first disrupting the power dynamics of grading.
  • “Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself.”
  • “There is an extreme mismatch between what we value and how we count.”
  • a mixture of things assessed and a mixture of kinds of assessment, because the work of being a doctor (or engineer, sociologist, teacher, etc.) is sufficiently complex that any one system of measurement or indicator of supposed mastery will necessarily fail.
  • “When the how’s of assessment preoccupy us, they tend to chase the why’s back into the shadows.” Grades are not something we should have ever allowed to be naturalized. Assessment should be, by its nature, an open question.
Bo Adams

Education innovator advocates for transdisciplinary 'StudioLab' | Cornell University Co... - 1 views

  • “Design thinking is a collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving approach to social innovation, organizational change, and product development that has been used in design, engineering, and education industries,” he says.
  •  
    "A 21st century learning approach requires more than rows of fixed seats, says Jon McKenzie. In a new transdisciplinary pedagogy that encourages active learning, McKenzie has combined the kinds of conceptual, aesthetic, and technical learning found in seminar, studio, and lab spaces into an approach he calls "StudioLab.""
1 - 13 of 13
Showing 20 items per page