Category: design
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We Need More Curious Dreamers, Tinkerers and Makers
Thank goodness Orville and Wilbur Wright were not lawyers or accountants! I love what Dr. Paul Czysz said in these 35 seconds of an intriguing 38 minute video interview: …all it takes is a dreamer. Can you imagine the Wright Brothers if one was a lawyer and one was an accountant? Why are you going to…
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Inspired by Ashley Vance’s Biography of Elon Musk
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) is not only an inspiring and fascinating person, he’s also one of the most important entrepreneurs of our times who is combining technology with hard work and engineering smarts to solve some extremely challenging problems we face as a human race. Today I finished listening to the biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance (@valleyhack)…
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Furniture Quest for a Collaborative Classroom
I’m in the Dallas, Texas, area this weekend (in Allen, specifically) serving as a chauffeur for my in-laws, who are visiting family. I’m also, however, on a furniture quest for my wife, as she seeks to create more spaces in her elementary classroom for collaboration and engaged learning. Yesterday I spent a couple hours at…
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Podcast427: Battlecode Coding Competition at MIT with Jonah Casebeer
This podcast features an interview with Jonah Casebeer, a 17 year old family friend and rising senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Alexandria, Virginia. Jonah and three of his classmates entered the annual “Battlecode” Artificial Intelligence Programming Competition at MIT along with about 400 other teams in the fall of 2014. Their…
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30 Reasons I Love Teaching Elementary STEM
This is my 20th year in education but my second year back in the classroom, teaching STEM full-time to 610 4th and 5th graders at Independence Elementary in Yukon, Oklahoma. Our STEM program is very unique, since it’s in the “specials “rotation for all students that also includes PE, Music and Art. This is the…
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Great Class Castle Build in MinecraftEDU
This afternoon after school we had our first meeting of “Makers Club” at our school for the semester. Generally we learn something new together and then students break up to work on different projects in our STEM classroom “Maker Studio.” Today, however, we opted to build a 64 x 64 block castle together (or at…
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Cool iPad Art & STEAM Apps & Hacks
Wednesday after school I shared a few different iPad apps and a great STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) drawing device with our art teacher at school whose classroom is just down the hall from me. Here’s the list of links I sent her afterward as a follow-up, along with a few other videos and…
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Group Building Design Challenge in STEM Class
(cross-posted with permission from STEMseeds.org) This semester in STEM class as one of our first lessons, I’m using the following “Group Building Design Challenge” to get my 4th and 5th grade students collaborating, designing, communicating, and creatively constructing in groups. This lesson idea originally came from an Oklahoma A+Schools workshop my wife, Shelly Fryer (@sfryer) attended,…