3D Printer and more Technology in the Classroom (plus the last Step II lesson of the semester)

 The week before Thanksgiving was pretty busy as it usually does as the semester draws to a close with all of its final presentations and final exams. I think that the first thing I want to talk about this week is my final lesson for Step II since I will be writing 5E lesson plans to close out the semester. Unlike the two previous lessons, my time management was poor. I made the strategic decision in the middle of the lesson to forego the evaluation I had prepared since our statistical examination that closes Step II will look at one evaluation in particular. The lesson was productive for my own growth. Upon reflection, I realized why my time management was so bad. On the surface, it looked like I had just allowed students too much time in the exploration section of the lesson. Looking more closely, I realized that I should have stopped the exploration section. Many students gave answers that indicated that either the lesson section's instructions were unclear or that the students ...
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Post for September 8th 2024

 My reflections on this past week are a melding of education standards and some of the ways in which we as student teachers can provide a framework for students to work through. Toward that end, we have looked more closely at the two articles we read last week. Those articles were about inquiry-based learning (I linked their APA citations last week). This week we have looked at a large repository of inquiry-based learning activities. They are sorted by subject and by grade. (The inquiry-based lessons can be found here: https://www.sciencefriday.com/educate/ ).

It is a fine resource with a large collection of activities. There are some that I couldn't connect with. But the extraordinarily large collection means that there will be something for everyone's taste, I feel. I chose two to reflect on and examine their lessons in relation to Georgia Education Standards.

The ones that I picked to look at are:
https://www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/flooding-probability/

https://www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/the-mortgage-realities-of-a-dream-home/

The first is an excellent overview of probability and how it applies to floods. The concept is rich with connections: mathematical, computer science, and social awareness.

Mathematically, I enjoyed the exercise because it allows students to begin a guided inquiry from binomial probability into statistical reasoning, where students can transfer the lessons of this exercise directly into a formative intuition about arrival time distributions.

It also connects deeply with a basic concept: what is a flood anyway? How can we even begin to calculate how much water is trapped in a flooded area? In this way, this exercise connects with algorithms that do just that. Computer scientists attempt to translate this concept most efficiently into computational syntax and semantics, yet the underlying theme is how can we know how much the flood carried with it in terms of water. 

This connects directly with these two exercises that I link for posterity:

https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/description/

https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water-ii/

The flood zone probability exercise can be extended to look at arrival times and also address the questions above. Those are mathematical at their core. Students exposed to a rich background and extension of flood probabilities can be guided to explore the fruitful extensions of natural curiosity about these topics. Lastly, it allows for some social commentary. Students can draw their own inferences but I feel that sharing this article in conjunction with this exercise can enrich their growth as students.

NBC News article from 2011: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna43018489

The second Science Friday lesson I chose allows students to explore housing payments, interest rates, down-payments and loan terms. I think that this lesson is practical and can come as a capstone activity following the completion of other more technical parts of the Georgia Education Standards that surround this activity. I think that students would probably have been exposed to the famous Pert formula before this. And likely also have some intuition toward understanding things like bacterial growth and interest rates being a type of growth rate. Once that foundation has been laid, the view of the Mortgage inquiry-based lesson expands and allows for more direct and focused inquiry. For example, the assignment can be augmented to give students a picture of the connection between discrete and continuous growth, how bacteria and home payments are similar and how to see that discrete growth is just a special case of continuous growth

I am grateful for the week's work we did in Step because, as I discovered in creating my own Padlet exercises earlier, there wasn't much readily found resources I discovered in the process. This gave me a better sense of the material that is out there and the type of work we must do to expand the publicly available lessons into ones that fit into a 5E lesson structure.

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