Explorers are taking to the high seas again in two new Kon Tiki rafts. This represents a wonderful learning opportunity for K-12 students in the areas of science, travel, exploration, rafts, history!
Click HERE for Kon Tiki 2!
6th grade students at Dawson School in Lafayette, CO collaborated with Western Disposal, a local business, in a community problem solving by design exercise to find an actionable solution to trash management: Click HERE for article.
This effort illustrates how school students can partner with local businesses to try to find solutions to local community challenges. BCILD is committed to helping schools integrate critical thinking, design thinking, and other problem solving techniques into classrooms through increased interactions with local community members.
School and Community – An Interactive Learning Experience
Sixth grade students were studying the California Gold Rush of the 1800s. They had to decide whether they were going to be miners or storekeepers. BCILD arranged for local entrepreneurs to come into the classroom to share their experiences in starting businesses. After students had formulated their plans, the group of business professionals (investment bankers, sole proprietors, and venture capitalists) from the community participated in an investor panel, vetting investment proposals. These investors listened to student proposals and questioned them as they would any pitch in a real world business setting. Students were urged to consider risk factors, financial budgets, earnings to debt ratios, and marketing.
By bringing community members into the classroom, students were empowered as they experienced genuine interactions. They were invigorated by relevant discussion. Students approached the material they were learning with a level of sophistication and maturity, uncovering new skills in negotiation, quick thinking, precise listening, careful word choice, teamwork, deliberate questioning, critical thinking, and analysis.
Students, teachers and professional community members came away from the project impressed by the learning and practice the students experienced. Their due diligence, coupled with the inspiration of business people in the classroom, expanded the students’ learning, solidifying not only the lessons of the demanding times of the Gold Rush years, but also lessons of business and the entrepreneurial quest. Additionally, students learned how to communicate respectfully, how to collaborate with team members, and how to set forth and defend those proposals with perseverance and quick thinking. These are skills we want today’s students to learn and practice, so that their messages are impactful and clearly articulated.
I am very happy to announce the formation of the non-profit Boulder Center for Interactive Learning at Dawson (BCILD).
The work of this Center, based on the campus of Dawson School in Boulder County, Colorado will focus on building a working model of how schools can fully integrate themselves into their local communities, developing thinking and problem solving skills in learners, and developing a curated online teacher resource in collaboration with museums, libraries, educational institutions, and environmental organizations.
Click HERE for BCILD.
BLUE EGG ADVISORY GROUP, LLC are very pleased to announce the launch of the Intooba construction kit for K-6 math and STEAM education. This innovative product enhances the creativity and learning of students in these grades.
Click HERE for INTOOBA
When rote learning education models closely mirrored early industrial production based economies, outputs in the classroom followed the teacher driven input- predetermined output style. Modern theories of education include a far greater degree of student involvement in their learning. Additionally, in an attempt to mirror rapidly changing political, environmental, and economic factors, problems presented to children often involve a necessity for self-directed inquiry where outcomes are far from preset. In such an environment, it is vital to provide an opportunity for children from an early age to interact with information inputs in the process stage of learning.
As such, developing ways for children to understand what process is includes opportunities to work mindfully in this space. Examples of process learning might include working with mathematical manipulatives, reading a recipe and making a cake, investigating the scientific method in a collaboration on a specific topic with a university professor/researcher while in high school, or identifying and investigating a social need and developing a product to meet that need. Processes already exist in many areas of education, but seldom are they identified as a specific learning goal in and of themselves. Design thinking, critical thinking, art appreciation and discussion, the scientific method, negotiation, and conflict resolution are just some of the topics which may fall under this category. Applying these techniques to multidisciplinary subject areas enhances students’ capacity to solve problems creatively.
Students need to delve into, and work through, process in order to grapple with the complexities and demands of modern society. Process inquiry meets the curiosity of students who are always asking why and how in their daily learning.
Modern children so seldom see the process of how something is made. They do not interact with authors as they delve into the writing process, nor do they do not see barns being constructed or crops being grown. They therefore miss out on the often-tedious tasks undertaken from idea to completed product. All interactions, production, thought processes, and output of any nature goes through a system and process. It is important for students to be able to think through what systems and processes are, how they are best defined, and how they might best be illustrated. This assists young learners in being observant of the world around them, questioning of how their environment operates, and being able to illustrate a written observation. The student handout is shown hereunder:
SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES
Systems and processes refer to the way the world around us operates. You may not have considered this before, but there are many such systems and processes all around us every day. Consider how the human brain controls our body motions, and vital functions. This is a system and a process. The system is the human body, and the process is the way the brain does this management. Other systems and processes, many of them man-made, include transportation systems, presidential debates, and how people get educated. A very simply system and process is how to make a cup of coffee. The system is the coffee beans are grown, prepared, and shipped to shops. The process is how you actually make a cup of coffee, or buy it.
Each of these follows a set of guidelines or procedures which usually occur in a sequence if they are to be successful. For example, consider the NYC subway system. It is a very complicated underground train system that allows millions of people to move around New York City quickly and efficiently. The system is the tracks and trains. The process is how people use it, including using a diagrammatic representation allowing people to see how to get from one place to another. You can Google it. Different colored lines represent different subway lines. So, it is a system, and process with a diagram.
Your task: 10 systems and processes. Write what they are (system), how they work (process), and try to draw a diagram of them. Please investigate 3 by yourself in class, 2 with a partner in class, 3 by yourself for homework, and 2 with an adult at home.
I was very interested to read the attached Mindshift article about how we view student academic struggle in schools. Eastern cultures appear to see struggle as an integral part of the learning process, whereas the article states that western cultures see struggle as a weakness, or something needing immediate correction. It would be interesting to have a discussion linking these perspectives with Angela Duckworth’s idea on developing grit.
Mindshift article HERE
There is a tendency among younger children to compartmentalize what they have learned in each discipline, and not to stretch one piece of learning into another discipline. A very interesting and engaging project is to ask the children to become travel agents, and plan a vacation trip of their own. In this way, students learn to navigate the quite complicated world of airline and hotel websites, choose destinations based on political safety, convert currencies, look at maps, research cities/destinations on the web, plan a budget, and learn something about a country or region. Asking children to do all this in a single project engages them fully in the learning process, and brings mathematics into geography, technology into budgeting and so on. Later, children can use these research skills in many ways on other projects. The joy of early learning is to master adaptable skills which are useful throughout life, but particularly as they progress through their formal learning environment.
TRAVEL PROJECT # 1
You are to become a travel agent. Book your ideal holiday vacation to a destination of your choice. You must give an itemized budget for your trip. Total available dollars: $8000.00
You may consider yourself a single adult for the purposes of this exercise.
You need to:
(1) Decide which time of year you will be traveling
(2) Find an airline. Ascertain rates for travel.
(3) Find a hotel. Get rates for thirteen or fourteen nights.
(4) Find what you will be doing and eating. Include in budget.
You need to write an essay on your project. Be sure to include:
History and geography of the place you are visiting
Write a detailed budget
Find an example of the following:
An artist
A politician
A mathematician or scientist
Describe something about their life or work. What contribution did they make to society? How does their work impact you?
Travel Project # 2
Travel to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World using the least amount of money, and in the shortest amount of time.
You must spend one night in each place.
