Engineering Applications

Since my last presentation went pretty well, Ms. Garcia asked me to give another. I decided to stick with energy related topics with the hope of introducing a topic they may want to pursue as a career. This week’s presentation was about solar panels. I figured the students were already somewhat familiar with solar panels but hadn’t thought about how they could work with them.

The talk started with how solar panels work, the amount of energy they can produce, and the careers associated with them – but the students weren’t interested in the technology’s potential. A few students became interested when I showed a picture of different solar sculptures. The sculptures were colorful, multidimensional, multipurpose, and significantly different from the traditional black box solar panel. Then I pulled up a slide about flexible solar cells that had a picture of the Michigan Solar Car and suddenly most of the class was asking questions. The students were amazed that college students could build something that looked so cool. I was glad that I had visited the solar car booth at the last two design expos because it definitely helped me answer the different questions the students asked.

I had one last slide – something mildly related to solar panels that I had heard about at a conference a few years ago. I showed a picture of the Mars Rover and explained how it was designed to last only a couple of months. Its powered by a solar panel and since it was running so much longer than originally predicted the panel would get covered with dust and the rover would stop. Then after just a short time of being stopped, a windstorm would clean the solar panel off. I had thought this was amazing and the students not only thought it was interesting but a couple actually said that it was pretty cool. I asked them what they would do to fix the problem if they were building the next rover. One student suggested attaching fans to the corners of the solar panel so they could blow the dust off. Another wanted to make wind shield wipers to wipe the dust off. I was really impressed by their suggestions, especially since I’ve seen both of their suggestions presented at conferences as research projects.

Resettling

Unfortunately, shortly after the previous posting, Mrs. Mills had to stop teaching for the semester for personal reasons. While the change does affect the students, it’s not a devastating loss to the Algebra Project classroom because several other teachers went through the AP training and have been working in the classroom on a nearly daily basis. These teachers, primarily Mrs. Garcia and Dr. Blair – neither from Ypsi High, have stepped up to become the instructors. Initially when Mrs. Mills left it was unknown whether she would return and the class went through several substitutes (for administrative purposes) while Mrs. Garcia and Dr. Blair continued teaching. While progress was being made during the last two weeks, the students asked when Mrs. Mills would be back every class period and some would refuse to listen to the teachers. Today, the students were told that their teacher would not be returning and Mrs. Garcia and Dr. Blair would be the teachers for the rest of the semester. The students took the announcement better than I expected and after a few questions they were able to move on and have a productive class period.

While I’ve talked about my research, given the students math puzzles, and helped during class periods I hadn’t given an engineering presentation to the class. Last Friday I gave my first engineering presentation about energy and wind turbines. I led them through the presentation by asking them specific questions about energy and then wind power. They could answer most of my questions and came up with several questions of their own. At the end of the presentation I showed them a picture of William Katawamba – who, when he was just 14, built a light bulb and radio-powering windmill in his front yard in Malawi with items from a junkyard just by looking at a picture in a text book he got from the local library. The students found the more personal aspect of this story very interesting and wanted to know all about the materials he used, how and why he built it, and what the windmill could power. While most questions were positive and most of the students were amazed at his accomplishments one student made it clear that he thought all people in Africa were richer than we are in the US and that the homemade houses, hunger, and lack of education were made up to suck more money out of the US. I wasn’t really sure how to respond to his statements – they weren’t even close to the questions/comments I thought would be asked – but I told him that it was true that there are rich people in Africa and even rich countries within Africa but there are also areas that are very poor and the people in those large areas live with far less than we do. He found my response mildly satisfying; I think he was more interested in making a scene than having a discussion because he moved on to talking to some of his classmates about an unrelated topic.

While things went a little off track at the end of my presentation, the majority of the class and my presentation went well. I now know that I need to make sure I hit on engineering stories the students can relate to during my presentations to allow them to take the most away from the experience. The class as a whole is getting used to this drastically different educational approach and I think they are going to start learning a lot more than they realize.

Turning point?

The year started off pretty well but the last 3 or 4 class periods the students’ attitudes have gone from positive and enthusiastic to negative and apathetic. The students don’t want to participate in any type of work – they complain that they aren’t learning any math (because the Algebra Project focuses on language initially) but they refuse to complete the simple math worksheets (3rd grade mad minutes) Mrs. Mills uses as a warm-up. Mrs. Mills had a heart-to-heart with them half way through the class and she is starting to keep a daily log of the students’ participation and behavior. She has threatened them with referrals before but has not given one yet, but I think the heart to heart may have a more significant impact in the long run because many of the students realize that she cares and they want to keep her as their teacher and they know they need to start being respectful.

During the past few classes each of the students chose a different landmark from the Detroit trip to place on the trip line. They each created an icon of that landmark and ordered them according to when they saw the landmark during the trip. This led to a class-long argument about the location of the café relative to the park. For some reason a couple of the students became extremely personally invested in the location and we had three groups of students – one group remembered the café before the park, one remembered the café after the park, and the third group remembered passing the café twice. After an hour of trying to determine where the café was located, Mrs. Mills stepped in and placed it before the park just so the class could move on to the next task. This completed the trip line, after working on it for two weeks, and the students could move on to the doing math with locations on the trip line. Maybe this progression will help the students settle in and see where the math is in the trip line.