Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Tag: stem

  • Visualizing Off-Planet Habitats

    Visualizing Off-Planet Habitats

    My middle school computer programming students are continuing to work on our “Coding Mars” unit, in which they are using Minecraft MakeCode to simulate the 3D printing of structures and habitats which Icon of Austin, Texas, is under contract with NASA to do first on the moon / the lunar surface and (ultimately) on Mars.…

  • Reflections on PD Hackathon 2023

    Today I’ve had an opportunity to participate, facilitate, and volunteer as a judge in our fall 2023 Hackathon at our school, Providence Day School of Charlotte, North Carolina. This is the second time I’ve been able to be part of the Hackathon, and in this post I’d like to reflect a little about some of…

  • Reflections on Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy (Part 1)

    This week I am attending a 4 1/2 day robotics workshop at Carnegie Mellon University, learning how to teach middle school robotics with the “Lego Spike Prime” robot platform. This is based on the Scratch programming language from MIT, which I love and have been using for over 10 years. In this podcast reflection (from…

  • Sharing My Enthusiasm for Space Exploration

    Last week when Shelly and I were attending the NASA Space Exploration Educators Conference at Space Center Houston, our students and colleagues were out of school with 3 snow days in a row! Today we were all back in class, and I took about 10 minutes in each of my classes to share a little…

  • Amazing #STEM Animated Visual Notes by Dominic Walliman

    I agree and resonate with many of the things Jaron Lanier shares in the Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” but I disagree with his advice on YouTube’s “recommended videos.” Jaron advises we should never click on “recommended videos” on YouTube, since that furthers the dystopian economic model of “surveillance capitalism” upon which many of Silicon…

  • The Orbital Perspective: Inspired by Chris Hadfield, Ed Robertson, the Wexford Gleeks and Rod Murray

    Thanks to a recommendation from my Canadian friend and fellow educator Rod Murray (@mrmuzzdog), this morning I started my day with an inspiring, co-created song by Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield), Ed Robertson (@edrobertson,) and the Wexford Gleeks (@wpa_to) recorded together when Commander Hadfield was orbiting our planet as an astronaut aboard the International Space Station in…

  • Twitter Documentation of Classroom Folio Observations

    This year faculty at our school have utilized Folio Collaborative (@foliocollab), an outstanding framework encouraging teacher peer-coaching and mentorship relationships among educational professionals. I’ve had the opportunity to serve as a “Folio coach” for three of our faculty, and today I worked on website documentation of the classroom visits and observations I completed last fall…

  • Podcast460: UCO and OCCC Concurrent Classes, GitHub in CompSci, and Elementary Coding Lessons

    Welcome to episode 460 of Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer, from March 13, 2018. This podcast features a series of three recent interviews, and opens with a recommendation to try the newly updated Anchor.fm website and Anchor mobile app for podcast creation and publishing. The first interview is with high school…

  • Learning at the March Oklahoma STEM Consortium Meeting

    This afternoon for lunch and after lunch, I had the wonderful opportunity to join our 6th and 7th grade science teachers at the bi-monthly meeting of the Oklahoma STEM Consortium facilitated by Anissa Angier (@AnissaSmiles). Anissa is the “K12 STEM Instructional Facilitator” for Edmond Public Schools, and has been helping organize and lead this group…

  • Educational Technology Updates for January 2018

    Hello and Happy New Year! That may sound odd on January 27, 2018, but it’s been over a MONTH since I’ve posted to my blog in mid-December. There are a variety of reasons for this, but rest assured I’m not becoming a “blog fader.” 🙂  This may be the longest lapse in blog posts for…