What if we teach engineering before reading?

My first interaction with Chris Rogers was at Florida State University in fall, 1997 where he gave a lecture quite similar to the one in the following video:



After the lecture, my advisor at the time, a control theory researcher, was so excited he came to our lab and asked if he should go ahead and buy a lego kit for us to do controls experiments with.

In the video, Chris wonders why its important to us that every kid knows how to read Harry Potter before age 8 but not understand how a car works? He argues that as kids go through adolescence, their curiosity shifts from the physical to the social. So first 3-4 years of education must focus on engineering before the social aspects grab kids' attention.

The intructional power of games, social networking and simulations

Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, Jennifer Groff and Jason Haas write in their whitepaper:

"Games, simulations, and social networking are already permeating the workplace as productivity and development tools—we may be doing our students a large disservice by not integrating these tools into their education."

They provide numerous examples of teachers who had integrated games, simulations and social networking tools in their classes.

Nine free iphone apps for interactive physics

Angela M. Kelly of Lehman College (CUNY, Bronx, NY) writes in an article in The Physics Teacher:

"In a conceptual physics class designed for ninth-graders, I created a structured activity where students applied Newton's laws to a series of free applications downloaded on iPod Touches. The laws had been introduced during the prior class session with textual descriptions and graphical representations. The course is offered as part of the Enlace Latino Collegiate Society, a weekend enrichment program for middle and high school students in the Bronx. The majority of students had limited or no prior exposure to physics concepts, and many attended high schools where physics was not offered at all. "

Following the table of nine free iphone apps from the article:

SimInsights software demo at Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education Conference in Berkeley

SimInsights software was demonstrated at the Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education (CyTSE) Conference in Berkeley. The conference was organized by National Science Foundation and brought together leading researchers in learning sciences, education technology and related fields.

 

All the keynotes were deeply insightful.On Wednesday morning, Dan Schwartz of Stanford University and Margaret Hilton presented the highlights of the latest NRC report which recognizes the tremendous potential of simulations and games. In the afternoon, Allan Collins of Northwestern University and Richard Halverson of University of Wisconsin presented excellent overviews of the revolution that is sweeping the field of education.

Collaborative simulation based multidisciplinary study by three high school student teams in CA, VA and NJ

We presented the results of a web-based collaborative modeling and simulation project at the National Science Teachers’ Association (NSTA) 2011 conference. The team consisted of following three teachers and their students.

• Joseph Santonacita, Physics teacher at Colts Neck High School in New Jersey
• Ajoy Vase, Math teacher at Ouchi High School in Los Angeles, CA
• Amol Patel, Biology teacher at Heritage High School in Virginia.
• Rajesh Jha, SimInsights, Irvine, CA

Collaboration, interdisciplinary systems thinking and communication are among the most sought after skills of the 21^st century. The objective of this project was to allow high school students to experience the challenges and opportunities in developing these vital skills.

We used a project-based learning (PBL) (bie.org) framework to guide the three student teams to answer the following driving question: How can physics, biology and math illuminate the motion of a pitcher throwing a ball? To answer this question, students worked together to understand muscle mechanics through a collaborative interdisciplinary approach combining ideas from physics, math and biology. The first phase of the project was completed and presented at NSTA. The second phase is ongoing. Following is the screenshot of our presentation annoucement at the nsta.org site:

The presentation slides are available here.

SimInsights receives grant from Orange County Engineering Council

Orange County Engineering Council (ocec.org) has awarded a small grant to SimInsights. The funds will be used to conduct a simulation contest for Orange County high school students over the next couple of months. This is an exciting opportunity to generate awareness about the power of collaborative simulations for deep STEM learning.

Cool video from GE showing interesting collisions of everyday objects

Take a look at this cool video from GE:



Its fun to observe the various collisions in this artistically filmed videos while enjoying the pleasant music. For that pleasure, I am willing to overlook the error of selecting Newton as unit for energy. I hope that this cool video will stimulate thought about the nature of collisions of everyday objects. As you can see, some of the objects are highly deformable and show wave-propagation in a very compelling way. Modeling these waves is a very challenging problem. However, modeling the overall motion and energy loss is very straightforward with simulation capabilities in SimInsights software such as SimNewton and SimMotion. A lot can be learned by building such models.