High Hopes Project – When we launch you can follow the flight live! Here’s how

Find out more about this project here.

Our launch has been delayed until June 5th and maybe not until the following week because of weather conditions. When we launch, a communications payload keeps us in touch with the balloon’s progress. Besides 2 SPOT Trackers that use satellite technology to pinpoint the balloons location once it lands (2 in case one fails)  a HAM radio transceiver sends out a signal that we (and you) can watch live on a Google map. To do so go to aprs.fi on the web and type in KE7BQV-14 (See image below) AFTER WE LAUNCH. You’ll have to keep checking back here to see when we plan to launch. We’ll give you at least a day before notice.

After we launch, about every minute or so, a new red dot will appear on the map tracing the flight.

The image above traces a finished flight (usually about 90 tp 120 minutes) and demonstrates the box that opens when you click on a red dot – clicking on the red dots can be a bit frustrating at times, you might have to try more than once and be careful to click right on the dot. Note the information provided: Date and time, speed, compass heading (in this case 265 degrees), and altitude in feet.

In addition, I’ll be tweeting out progress as much as possible: @bcrosby

Africa’s plastic bag ban seems to be working, and a STEM challenge idea

My wife and I were fortunate to travel to Africa this past summer. Our itinerary included Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. We were notified by most of the listed countries when we applied for tourist visas that we were not to bring plastic bags into the country under penalty of heavy fines. This sparked my interest since during the past year I had helped develop a 5th grade STEM engineering lesson on reducing plastic pollution in the ocean.

I photographed this leopard with a Canon pocket camera with a 40x zoom lens in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania in July 2019.

We spent most of our time on safari in Tanzania, and I asked our guide about the reason for the new law. He explained that the small towns (and other areas) we would occasionally pass through had become heavily polluted with plastic trash. Towns were severely blighted with bags and other plastics stuck in trees, bushes, power lines and blowing drifts of trash on the ground. As we were passing through I was impressed by the cleanliness of these towns now. There was an initial national program that collected the plastic and now the goal is to keep them clean by banning plastic bags and other types of plastic trash.

You can imagine this scene with plastic bags stuck in the trees and grasses and how that would effect the wildlife and beauty in so many ways.

Other issues with plastic pollution is that bags collect water when it rains and then become perfect breeding ponds for malaria carrying mosquitoes. Plastics wash into the drainage and sewer systems where they clog and back-up the sewers and eventually dump their load into other waterways and the ocean.

Of course one of the driving forces behind the ban was to keep plastics out of their beloved national parks. Parks that are vital to their economy. Our experience bore this out. The scenery was beyond spectacular. In the parks you are immersed in animals – they are everywhere. And in nine days in the Serengeti I saw no plastic trash, except where it was supposed to be … in the trash.

Plastic pollution is a great STEM challenge for our students of all ages. It is a difficult problem to address, but it effects all of us. It involves not just removing the plastic and micro-plastics from our water and land, but also cutting off the flow of plastics that enter the environment every day. You’ve seen the photos of animals with plastics wrapped around and stuck in their bodies. Those photos of animals and plastic infested waters are also great motivators to our students to get involved with and persevere in finding solutions.

Baby Giraffe. Still had some of its umbilical cord attached.

Students can design machines and other methods to remove plastics that can involve computer programming to operate and stress re-design, and collaboration. Students can also mount marketing and public awareness campaigns using social media in powerful, “real life” contexts where they really make a difference. Think social media and photos, videos and other sharing media used in ethical, meaningful ways to promote keeping plastics out of the environment.

Sunrise over the Serengeti. Wildebeests.

This is “messy” learning for sure. It takes time to do well and so it mostly doesn’t happen in our schools even though we know it is the very kind of learning experience we should be providing. It is the work and powerful learning that is so lacking today. It promotes awareness of the world around us, the wonder and issues the world provides AND the motivation to do real work. Work that cries out for collaboration, problem solving, creativity and perseverance.

STEM and inquiry learning should not only be jumping from one cool project or experiment to the next. We leave too much of the potential learning behind when that happens. At least a few times each year the take a project to a refined ending, including integrating (writing, speaking, social studies, math, PE … really anything) analyzing the data, collaborating (globally if possible), continuing the engineering design cycle through multiple iterations and even taking the time to “polish” the end product. That polishing is where the connection to art often flourishes. Shape, color, textures and more of the finished product are difficult and provide new challenge and problem solving that connects to more students.

Consider the learning projects solving issues like plastic pollution provide for students and jump in!

Learning is messy!

(More photos can be found here and here)

Helping Nevada’s Homeless – A 4th grade NGSS STEM Engineering Lesson – an introduction

Last year I was part of a team funded by the Nevada Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology to provide the first Engineering Fellows Program for 5th grade teachers. The model learning sequence we started the program with was about the issue of plastic pollution, specifically how it effects the ocean. 5th grade students were challenged to design and engineer a way to remove plastic from the ocean.

This year the program is focused on 4th grade teachers and their students. The model NGSS aligned engineering lesson we’ll start them with is about helping the homeless by engineering a way for them to charge devices when they have little to no access to electricity. The teachers (and their students) will learn how homeless people face the issue of being contacted after they’ve interviewed for a job (or a doctor’s appointment and other issues). So being able to recharge a phone or other devices could aid them in solving their homeless situation.

I plan to post the whole lesson sequence later, but wanted to share the basic concept since I was working on it a bit today assembling this simple alternator.

Students, in small groups, will assemble the alternator, including wrapping the wire, which is no easy feat. Next, after researching the issues that the homeless deal with, students will design a way to spin their alternator to generate electricity. We will NOT share any ideas for this with students, but I would assume some might design a handle or perhaps some kind of wind turbine or who knows? That’s the messy learning part I love. I put one together today and had some issues getting the wire to wind without kinking. Teachers will do this themselves during our first meeting so that they gain worthwhile experience that helps facilitate their students later in class.

My alternator worked fine lighting the LED. You spin the green axle to generate electricity.

The grant pays for materials for the teacher sessions and the materials they’ll need for their students. In addition at the end of the program teachers will get a grant for $1,000 to purchase the materials required to teach lessons they and their colleagues develop during the program. I’ll share our progress along the way.

Learning is messy!

High Hopes Project HAB Launch 6/1/18

Group photo just before launch

I’m going to try and catch up on some long past due posts about the High Hopes Project. Last June we launched from Virginia City High School in Nevada. I posted about the preparation for the launch which will give you good background on the payloads students designed. The launch went flawlessly – perfect weather, not a puff of wind.

 

 

 

Besides the student payloads and GoPro cameras, we launched our Flir infrared camera as well which gave us some interesting perspectives. Note the shadows in this shot:

Note the long shadows from the early morning sun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then note what appear to be shadows in this screenshot taken from the video shot by our infrared camera soon after launch:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What appear to be shadows are not. They are cooler areas on the ground caused by the shadows of the balloon and students. Note the balloon has already been launched and is 200 feet in the air (or more), how could its shadow be where it was before it launched?

Here is video of the launch in infrared:

And here is the launch taken from the ground:

One of the student payloads was an interesting sound experiment. The question they were trying to answer was: “At high altitude above 98% of the Earth’s atmosphere, would the air be so thin that sound would not travel through the thin air to be picked up by a microphone?” The students designed a Tie-Fighter from Star Wars (just for fun) and had the Star Wars theme playing on a loop. You can see the ball shaped speaker in the center of the video. They insulated the base so sound would not travel through the payload and be picked up by the microphone. It started out great, but unfortunately at about 42,000 feet it just got too cold (probably around -10F) and the batteries, which had lasted for 3 hours when they did a test in a school freezer at 15F, just quit. We edited together video from launch and then spliced in at about 8,000 feet and then just before the batteries died:

Another student payload took on the engineering task of releasing the “High Hopes” of the world. Students and others from around the world had submitted their high hopes for their school, community and the world through a Google Form or Twitter (about 1100 were submitted). The “Hopes” were printed out and cut out individually and placed in a payload students had designed to open about an hour into the mission. Again the batteries they had tested, and lasted for 5 hours at 15F, that ran the motor that would open up the payload to release the high hopes failed. Fortunately they had designed in a back-up system. When the balloon burst and the payloads fell to Earth at over 200 miles per hour (until the parachute slowed them down at lower altitude) a fin on the side of their payload caught the wind and pulled open a side of the payload and released the high hopes.

High Hopes release at about 95,000 feet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is video of the burst and high hopes release in slow motion:

After a flight we like to note what happens to the balloon on the way up. Note in the photo at the top of this post the 2000 gram balloon is probably about 6 – 8 feet across (we over-filled it a bit so it would go up fast and come down before it got too far up in the mountains and private property). When it burst it was just a bit bigger:

At launch the payloads almost cover up the balloon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But just before burst at 95,000 feet … note any difference in balloon size? If so, why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some more photos taken up high:

Burst

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lake Tahoe on the left, Pyramid Lake on the right at 92,000 feet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yerington, Nevada, from 90,000 feet. A wide angle setting on this camera and the movement from falling exaggerates the Earth’s curve in the photo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many more photos on this Flickr album.

We came very close to “catching” this one on the way down, but were thwarted when we lost cell service (so GPS as well) at a key point in the descent and missed it by about 2 minutes.

Learning is messy!!

What Happened to the Potential of Social Media in Education?

A post that happens when Twitter isn't enough

Dean Shareski posted this to Twitter (SM = Social Media):

Read the thread of comments (it’s worth a minute or 2) by following the link.

I’ve written a bit about this before, and ironically that post from 8 years ago also involved Dean (Who’da Thunk?).

Dean is right, when this social media thing was new and all, some of us saw a powerful potential for it’s use in the classroom and beyond as a thoughtful, motivating and powerful way to connect our students with each other, and experts, and locations, and learning that hadn’t been very accessible before. Now they were available, and they were available on a global scale. Time zones were pretty much the major obstacle (and fear for some, really many I guess). I co-wrote a book about what we had learned along the way because we found it was pretty much as awesome as we thought it would be.

Many of us sang the praises of blogging and Twitter and Flickr and Skype and Facebook (except it was usually blocked even more often than the others). We’d encourage and almost demand that those attending presentations we were giving sign up for Twitter … RIGHT NOW! …. and provide the screenshots to follow and time to sign up. This was such an powerful tool we had to evangelize to the world about it.

So what happened? Plenty of good things happened. Many teachers made those connections and shared learning experiences that were leveraged by the use of online tools. Blogging was my favorite because a blog can be writing, but also photos, video clips, podcasts, and more … and the photos could be of student artwork field trips, math …. any subject. My class connected with Dean a few times when he was working with teachers in Canada … but we danced with students in New Zealand, performed experiments with classrooms around the world, shared guest speakers and much, much more.

So what didn’t happen? Plenty. Among the things that didn’t happen was what usually happens in education – a lack of professional development, especially for those that needed more support and experience to see the value. Just doing “technology” isn’t where the value is, but that is where schools/education in general tended to go … the message too many get is that just by doing school on a computer will bring the change we are looking for … so not true.

Fear was and is big – will the boogey-man get me or my students and will I get in trouble? Access – to the internet, to technology (well the lack of access really) is and was a roadblock. Time, in reality, but also the perception of lack of time for all this stuff stops many from gaining the experience necessary. A very demanding, narrowed and scripted curriculum that does not lend itself to integration, going deep and being thoughtful … that happened big time.

I think the potential is still there. It just needs a re-birth of sorts. At least more of us know the nuts and bolts of getting online and setting up accounts and some safety concerns. Perhaps now the focus needs to shift to the powerful collaboration, connecting, editing, sharing between our students about important things (not mostly bopping around via video-conferencing to figure out where someone’s school is) that these tools provide us. Share science data, stories, poetry, how to do things, art projects, robot designs and so much more … and take the time to do them well and even the time to re-edit and re-present. Then have conversations about them in the comments … and teach students how to have the positive, supportive discourse that makes it powerful and the world a better place.

There’s lots more to say about this, its a very important discussion that should be ongoing … maybe we can have some of that discussion in the comments here (or on Twitter or elsewhere). I’m out of time for now. I hope this continued Dean’s Tweet conversation in a meaningful way.

Learning is messy!

Class dynamics and culture are really time consuming AND really worth every minute!

When you visit awesome schools, it always the culture you notice and talk about

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about assuming students have collaboration skills and building class culture. These vital learning pieces were greatly deemphasized and cut (even ridiculed as a waste of time) during the last 15 years or so of school “reform.” I meant to include a paragraph or so about how time consuming building class culture and group dynamics is (what tends to be called “Social Emotional Learning” today) … which is one of the reasons they were vilified, since making sure every piece of every “researched based” ELA, math, intervention and writing program must be implemented with absolute fidelity, and that took up the whole day … no time for anything else (even apparently  science, art, social studies, PE …..).

I was fortunate to be part of a staff long ago that was told in no uncertain terms before school started, that we should take 4 to 8 weeks to focus on building a supportive, collaborative culture in our classrooms. The principal was looking for that happening from the first day of school and the staff worked together on lessons and activities and literacy pieces and projects all designed to foster and build that culture. I remember my first year at that school wondering how that would take 4 to 8 weeks (with follow ups throughout the year). BTW it wasn’t like we didn’t teach reading and math and science and everything else … its just that we took some of the time for those subjects, especially early on to teach whole lessons and discussions and talk about what we were reading (Crow Boy, Maniac Magee, and others were favorites) that centered on respect, collaboration skills and more.

My students even produced some award winning video projects that sprang up around our work in these areas: Don’t Laugh At Me and Being Different come to mind as student initiated projects. And these took a lot of class time for students to produce. But the language and discussion and writing and creativity they spawned were incredible. And if we had problems come up later in the year it wasn’t unusual that we would watch and discuss these videos and revisit discussions about books and activities we’d experienced. IT TOOK TIME! Valuable time, but valuable time well spent (and note the arts and hands-on technology use … and when I run into these students from time to time (now past college graduate age whether they went to college or not) these projects and others are what they want to talk about.

So my message here is it shouldn’t just be that you have a Social Emotional Learning program at your school with siloed lessons …. we should be spending the time to make this kind of learning and work part of the culture at school and in our communities. I think we are currently experiencing the results first hand of cutting these experiences because ELA and math were more important.

Learning is messy!

Never assume your students know how to work together on a project

Early in the year do some mini projects to scaffold them

I remember back in the day (or do people still do these?) when teachers in 4th or 5th grade tended to assign “the state” or “the country” report. Way too often the assumption was made that the students pretty much knew how to do these. The teacher would pass out the “packet” that explained the project, showed an example of a bibliography and often included templates for specific information that was to be included (state name, population, area in square miles, draw a map labeled with specific information and so on). Photos, usually from cut up National Geographic Magazines or brochures from travel agents were required. Typically the report was due in a month or six weeks. Each week they would have students check in with their progress and to allow students to ask questions about anything they didn’t understand about the report.

Like science fair projects it often appeared like someone a bit older (and maybe with a college degree?) might have “helped” somewhat …  or they were incomplete or were of poor quality. Some did well, but how much learning actually occurred was questionable. This was the way this had always been done, it was “challenging” and, like the infamous science fair project, expected.

One of my main concerns about these projects was the assumption that students knew how to do all the work that went into the report and this was just a chance for them to put together a big project integrating all those skills. AND, after all, they were allowed to ask questions about what they didn’t understand (like they would even know exactly what they didn’t understand or know how to do). Since these were really long term homework projects the teacher didn’t see the work being done which made facilitating difficult.

Early in my career I had the same experience when facilitating projects in my classroom. I knew doing projects was supposed to be “good stuff,” so it was important to do them.  Things would often hum right along as students worked on a project and I would allow myself to get sucked into observing from across the room, just to keep an eye on things, and would even do a quick task like lunch count or attendance or a quick email. Questions would pop up or a student or 2 would need some redirection, but often it was great to just let students work – or so I told myself.

Too often though after a “way too short” a period of time, some students would start claiming they were “done” or “done with that part”. Their work was almost always poor or incomplete or was off subject or all the above. This led to frustration on my part and a decreasing interest in the project by students (which was more frustrating since this is an awesome project dammit!!!).

Another observation I noted was that students were often very poor at working in a group. Even though I’d make groups have a meeting before they could get to work to go over what needed to be done that day and split up the work … which everyone in the group had to agree on so the group couldn’t just dump certain tasks on certain individuals. There would still be individual students off task, wandering around and too often causing issues. When the group would complain the student would often claim the work was dumb or boring … the group would respond that they agreed to do that part and weren’t getting anything done.

It took me awhile to understand that what was really going on (at least most of the time) was that this off track student didn’t really understand what to do, or how to do it, or even what the reason for it was. Anger, name calling and frustration was often the result (and more frustration for me … “the students were so excited about this project!!!”)

What I learned from these experiences and various classes, PD sessions and conversations with peers was that I was assuming students knew how to do these things … and mostly even the “on-task” students didn’t have a good grasp of them.

 I learned to do some relatively simple individual and group projects, early in the year especially. I’d do some without much work on group dynamics and let problems arise so we could talk about the real feelings they were having and then give them some skills to constructively deal with them.

One they loved was role playing the very issues they had just experienced. I would usually take a seat in a group and demonstrate how calling each other names was probably NOT going to lead to cooperation. Instead I would teach them to ask questions like, “Toni do you understand how to do that?” – Often that was the crux of the problem … the group mate just didn’t know exactly what to do but didn’t want to admit that and look dumb. Another important skill was just noting that maybe 2 students in the group should work on that part together … which led to students experiencing really being included.

We would brainstorm how to talk to each other respectfully. Next we would role play different “off task” situations and have every group talk through the issue to a positive conclusion (how to deal with a student in their group wandering around or throwing things or just sitting there). These were a hoot, lots of laughter, especially when a student that had a reputation of being a “model student” took on the “off task” student role. It was so obvious the more we did these lessons that one of the issues was that students just didn’t have the words or skills to deal with conflicts that arise.

I also had a rule that I would not come to answer a question unless everyone in the group had the same question and had their hands up. This promoted using your group members as resources and saved lots of time. You don’t end up or bouncing around the room or with the line of students waiting  to ask you a question they could have had answered quickly by the group. It also fostered a “working together” culture.

We’d talk about how fast the time goes by when you are truly cooperating and looking out for each other. And they saw this play out.

In addition I started walking around the room and sticking my head into each group to listen and watch –  all the time … I’d take notes about lessons or “mini-lessons” I should consider when I’d note anything from paragraphing, a science concept, how to use a technology piece or tool, how to add white glue to paint so it doesn’t crack when you paint landscapes and other cooperative group dynamics issues and more.

I stopped making these projects homework, unless a student or students asked if they could work on it after school or at home. It was way too valuable to do assessment through their doing. Observing and facilitating student work gets to individual and class strengths and weaknesses and students see that this is something they didn’t know how to do, but has value in their learning and doing.  What I made homework was resource gathering – materials, but also experts in their lives – someone’s family member that had a certain skill or knowledge to share. Some even found experts online and we had numerous video-conferences with experts contacted by students. 

When I work with teachers in my current job and bring up these ideas the number one obstacle for them is not believing they have the time or “permission” to spend on building a culture of learning.

This blog is entitled, “Learning Is Messy,” and building a supportive classroom culture is as messy as it gets. But in my experience it is what this testing, accountability and assessment culture has gotten us away from.

So as you start this year off, think of doing some simple projects to build a learning culture on.

Learning is messy!

Bee-Bot Collaborative Dance

 Awhile back I (well, the place where I work) was able to purchase 3 Bee-Bot “Hives.” A hive is 6 Bee-bots, a charger plate and a yellow backpack to carry everything around. Once I had them I quickly put together a class for Pre-K – 2 teachers. The first class met about a month ago and our next class met last night.

Along with the teachers sharing out what their students have been up to (they are so excited!!!) and me sharing a few more resources on our class “Bee-Bot” wiki page, I asked them to try out a collaborative Bee-Bot activity I thought up. Now to be fair I don’t know if others have thought of this before and done this already – so I don’t want to take undue credit. I was thinking about how to make what you do already with Bee-Bots have an even stronger collaborative bent when I came up with this:

Pair 2 pairs of students and their shared Bee-Bots and have them work together to choreograph a “dance.” Start on opposite sides of a table or facing each other on the floor. Start out having the Bee-Bots approach each other until they are face to face. Next keep adding to your program so the Bee-Bots go around each other, back and forth etc. They can keep adding commands to make their dance longer and more intricate.

Here is a video of one of the teachers “coding” her Bee-Bot with the program she and her partner designed:
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Here is a clip of their Bee-Bot dance:
IMG_7587
And here is a dance choreographed by another pair of teachers:
IMG_7588
I’m looking forward to seeing their students taking on this challenge in the weeks ahead.

Learning is messy!

2017 Math & Science Institute – for teachers

In New Orleans ... and it's FREE!

Earlier this year I agreed to lead two grant funded STEM professional development courses for teachers sponsored by Metairie Park Country Day School, June 7th, 8th and 9th, 2017. The courses will be held at Tulane University in New Orleans as part of the 2017 Math & Science Institute. AND NOTE THIS – You just have to get there – tuition is FREE! (note the flyer to the right for more information). Note: private school teachers have to pay $149 per course.

Each course is about 6 hours long spread over the 3 days (2 hours per day, per course). Here’s a page with all the course descriptions.

I’ll be teaching 2 courses: “Powerful, Connected, Collaborative and Global STEM Learning” and “STEM: Hands-on, Minds-on, Creativity-on”

From the online course description:

STEM: Hands-On, Minds-On, Creativity-On is a six-hour course designed to help teachers integrate powerful STEM learning with a focus on engaging, hands-on engineering lessons. Participants will not only experience the lessons firsthand, but also how to collect and analyze the rich data the lessons produce. Strong connections to science, language arts, technology, art, the Next Generation Science Standards and three dimensional learning will be included. Most lesson activities utilize easily obtained materials.

Powerful, Connected, Collaborative, Global, STEM Learning is a six-hour course designed to allow you to see how the power of STEM inquiry projects are leveraged when students are connected and collaborate globally.

There are several Common Core State Standards that require students to utilize technology to collaborate starting in elementary school. This course will provide hands-on engineering lessons and phenomena – coupled with free or cheap collaborative online tools that promote sharing and analyzing data, explanations, global awareness and much more. Participants and their students will learn to collaborate and share through powerful writing, oral language, photography, math, art and other media. Online safety and ethics will be featured.

Check out the 2017 Math & Science Institute home page to see all the courses being offered.

Hope to see you there!

Learning is messy!

NSUAVCSI Classroom Re-Visit

Dilworth STEM Academy

I’ve written about Mike Ismari’s class before (here and here). He received a grant last summer to buy several models of drones and flight simulators to use with students.
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ABOVE: Mike’s drones finally arrived and are stored on shelves his students are building.

Since he had little to no experience with drones he signed up for our institute. His plan was to learn the safety, ethics, programming and operation of UAV’s and then when his drones arrived he’d be ready to go. But, one thing after another delayed his purchase, so he kept checking out NSUAVCSI drones … finally his have arrived along with iPads to operate them. He stopped by my office yesterday to return some Phantom 3’s he’d checked out and told me I had to come by again and check out what his students were up to.

10 students were flying Parrot Air Cargo Minidrones using Tynker to program them. Mike rotates his students through these different activities. Students were paired up – a student that had experience programming the drones with an inexperienced student. The experienced student talked and prodded the new student through the steps to program the drone “around the mountain” -portrayed by a chair on a table. The goal is to take off, fly around the mountain making specific maneuvers meant to keep a front pointing camera (which these don’t have – only down-looking) pointed at the mountain and eventually land back on the spot where it launched. I shot some video of 2 students doing just that.

In this first video (less than a minute long) they are troubleshooting their most recent flight: IMG_7219

Now they run the program with the changes they just made (about 20 seconds)
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Some students were learning and practicing computer programming on the NCLab program our grant provided:IMG_7218

Others were constructing vehicles: DSCF0473

Others were practicing with RealFlight flight simulators (not pictured).

Great “messy” things happening! More photos and videos on the link below:

Flickr Album from the visit

Learning is messy!