When curiosity is sparked...

As I stated in this post two days ago, my "Engineering for Social Good" students are taking a break from our standard online curriculum (which is ROUGH at best) to participate in the Rube Goldberg Bar of Soap Challenge. Using the "File Upload" feature in Google Forms students submitted their initial plans for their machine. See screenshot of form below. 

I grabbed the first four submissions to the form and included them below. 

That's all I got for you today! Have a fabulous Thursday. It is Thursday, right? 

Dear Amazing Friends, Family, and Colleagues,

I hope this message finds you all doing fabulous! I am writing to ask a favor of you. I am currently teaching a course called "Engineering for Social Good" to Sonoma Academy 10th-12th graders. As part of our online curriculum, students were challenged to develop and  generate proposals for design ideas to serve populations that have been impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Last Friday students completed website ROUGH DRAFTS that include a proposal description, and rough prototype designs on paper/CAD, etc. Those proposals have now been organized into one location for judging and feedback. This is where I need your help. 

If you have a few moments, I would be honored if you visited THIS site and navigate to the proposals and prototypes designs on each site. Skim each, and when done please choose your top 3 favorites  and "RATE" each out of five stars. Additionally, if the spirit moves you, I would be honored if you left a comment providing feedback to any of the projects. My goal is to have all projects rated by end of day on Wednesday, 4/30. 

Note: these are simply proposals forcing student reflection on identifying and filling gaps in our community through a lens engineering and service. I am pitching this to students as a "Hackathon" where the highest rated projects will receive extra support to move forward with their ideas. 

Thank you so much for your time,
Ramsey 

I am struggling to find something to write about today. Rather than force some philosophical musing, I thought the most tangible/useful thing (especially for fellow STEM educators) would be to simply list all the of tools I have used thus far and their purpose. Links lead to application examples or directly to the resource itself. 

• Google Docs: Central location for all lesson links. 
• Google Forms: Medium for all lessons. 
• YouTube: Embedded videos IN forms. 
• Padlet: Public sharing and commenting of artifacts created. 
• PhET: HTML5 Lab Simulations 
• FoldIt: Protein Folding Lab Simulation
• Concordia Consortium: Protein Folding Simulation
• Google AI Experiments: HTML5 Neural Net Training
• Neural Net Playground: HTML5 Neural Net Training
• Newsela: Scaffolded article reading and reflection. 

As I alluded to last Friday, there is something in the "Distance Learning Air" right now that is difficult to push through. That being said, I am determined to help my students negotiate this time the best I can. Sensing the need in all of my students to clear their minds and create, I decided to put traditional curriculum aside for the first part of this week and allow my students to strengthen their design, engineering, prototyping skills, and submit an entry to the Rube Goldberg "Bar of Soap" challenge introduced as a community building activity during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Click here for an NY Times article on the challenge. Click here for a video with formal instructions for your students. Click here for the lesson (via Google Forms) I pushed out to my students today to engage with the materials and here for the assignment prompt. 

The below images show the difference between the standard inquiry cycle I do during our face-to-face classroom time and how that cycle is being translated into 2 hour inquiry cycles during the online instruction. Additionally, below are active links from yesterday's lesson in my chemistry class for reference with respect to how the technology integrates into the process.  I prefer using works like "Check In", etc., rather than "Explore" to keep students AWAY from the pedagogical. thought process in my head, and simply INTO the task in theirs. 

1. Check In
2. Lesson 
3. Check Out