GPS in STEM Education

There is an interesting Web site that deals with science teaching at all grade levels called The Science Spot at the URL: http://sciencespot.net. This site offers much to science and STEM teachers. I was looking for ideas to use GPS in the classroom and for Boy Scouts. I found that the Science Spot had a number of activities using GPS on the following Web page: http://sciencespot.net/Pages/classgpslsn.html. This site has a lot to offer in all areas of science primarily at the middle grades level, but with lessons at for other grade levels as well. Enjoy!

Information about Engineering

Educators and students interested in engineering need to be able to find information about schools, programs, careers, trends, and more. Here are several sites I have found that are valuable in getting information about any aspect of engineering. They may lead you to places and ideas you have never dreamed of. Enjoy!
http://www.engineering.com/
http://www.discoverengineering.org/
http://www.asee.org/
http://vlib.org/Engineering
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos027.htm
http://www.tryengineering.org/
http://www.engineeringsights.org/
http://www.engineershandbook.com/index.htm
http://www.engineeringedu.com/competitions.html

Fuel Our Future Now from Discovery Education

An excellent source of STEM instructional materials can be found at Discovery Education (http://discoveryeducation.com/). The Fuel Our Future Now set of new STEM activities and competitions is now available for elementary, middle and high school grade levels at the Fuel Our Future Now Web site (http://www.fuelourfuturenow.com/). Teachers, students and parents can access activities, lesson plans, videos, virtual labs and competitions from this site. Take a look at all the activities that deal with transportation, energy and more.

NASA Engineering Design Challenges

NASA has a number of interesting design challenges at the the URL: http://edc.nasa.gov/ Some of them can be done in one day while others take longer. We did the Thermal Protection System (heat shield) challenge in our Summer Space Science Camp and the students really liked the activity. NASA has students and teacher handouts that can be printed on the challenges page at the URL: http://edc.nasa.gov/challenge.html
I hope you enjoy these STEM activities with your class!

Engineering Shorts
Through the course of the school year I like to do what I call "engineering shorts." These are short (1/2 to 1 period long) problem solving/engineering exercises similar to training exercises done in industry for team-building, efficiency, and problem solving sessions. I like to do these with both my physics and engineering classes for these same reasons. The engineering shorts can be used to help teach certain concepts or they can be very integrated allowing for many ideas to be touched on by the activity, such as: problem solving, communicating, leadership, time budgeting, financial budgeting and more. There are a few really good engineering shorts that I have come across, one of which is the the Kaizen Bridge activitiy. Kaizen means "continuous improvement," and businesses use these activities to improve and streamline production. I had the husband of one of my colleagues come and present this activity to my engineering class, and they loved it. He had a modified version of one I had seen before, but it was just as good. You can see a similar activities online at the URL:

Writing in Science and Engineering
Writing in the content area is extremely important, but often writing in the technical areas is overlooked. I have been requiring students to write out lab reports and keep logbooks for years, but this year I wanted to take it up a notch after talking with a number of professors from Cleveland State Univ., Ohio State Univ., and Akron Univ. All told me to get the students writing technical papers, so that they have experience before they get to college. I settled on the APA style format because they will be using that style in undergraduate and particularly graduate school, and it is a technical style of writing. I also found that my students were not even exposed to the APA writing style in their English classes, which predominantly use MLA. I saw a great opportunity to expose them to technical writing and a more technical writing style. They students had a rough time at the beginning because they wanted to add a lot of fluff to their papers, rather than getting to the point, and they had to learn a new paper format and citation format, but they caught on quickly and actually liked the APA style after a few papers. The best thing about the writing though is that I started the online Student Journal of Science and Engineering (SJSE) (www.marencik.com/sjse) which enables my students to be formally published. Teachers, parents, administrators and members of the community have all read their papers, and the SJSE has been a huge success. One major benefit that I did not foresee, but came about as the year progressed was the fact that my students were referring to their published papers in college interviews. When admissions officers asked for samples of my students' writings, they guided them to the SJSE and there they were published technical writing samples that have undergone a review process. I was very pleased to hear this. I realized then how important writing in the content area really is. Students need to be exposed to different writing styles and purposes.

Cross-Content Projects
I will be putting on a STEM/engineering workshop in a few weeks with teachers from grades K-12. I will be disseminating design project idea from my own courses. A number of teachers attending the workshop are in the elementary grade levels. Although I have modified a number of my own high school projects for elementary and middle school grades, I am interested in more projects that may incorporate, not only science and math, but also other content areas such as social studies, language, art and music. I would like to have a number of cross-content projects that will enable teachers to hit many subjects in one activity.