6th grade

Gallery

Designing the Ideal Chair

6th grade chair with plenty of storage available!

6th grade chair design with plenty of storage available!

As part of our Level Up Village course, 6th grade students have been learning about the Engineering Design Cycle.  I challenged my 6th grade technology students to put the cycle into use by designing the ideal chair for a student.   We brainstormed together problems that might need to be addressed through the chair’s design. For instance, is the chair flexible? Portable?  Comfortable?  Adaptable?  Safe?  Easy to clean, build, or move around?  Nice to look at?  I was impressed by the variety of problems students considered as they sketched their designs on paper.

6th grade chair with a rounded design.

6th grade chair with a rounded design.

After drawing their chairs on paper and conducting a critique with their partner, students built prototypes of their chairs using Sketchup.  Many students used a “subtractive” method, cutting away from a larger block.  Above you can see four of the finished designs.  Students approached the problem of creating a chair many different ways and found extremely creative solutions.  This week we are putting our Sketchup skills to the test as we design and assemble solar lamps.  Stay tuned!

6th grade chair design that is connected to the ceiling.

6th grade chair design that features a hanging seat (the circles on top connect to the ceiling).

Technology Careers Assembly

Mimi Onuoha and Surya Mattu present in the Meetinghouse.

Mimi Onuoha and Surya Mattu present in the Meetinghouse.

This week the Middle School was honored to host a panel of amazing technology entrepreneurs, programmers, and artists who spoke with our students about the wide variety of ways they solve problems, create products, and use computer programming to redefine our relationship to our phones and social media streams.

Many of the panel members were Friends Seminary parents who work in technology fields, and several amazing parents inspired the idea for the assembly and worked with me to plan the panel and find contacts in the industry.  We saw a photo of the birth of Twitter (before it was known as Twitter) and viewed maps of GPS phone data, visualizations of Instagram health-related hashtags, and devices invented to re-power cell phones during Hurricane Sandy.

Our students impressed me by asking questions about the privacy of their information online, preferences for programming languages (Java or Python, anyone?), and how wireless networks work.  Based on the resulting conversations this week, many students walked away with a broader idea of how technology might be used in their future lives, and more questions about how it is changing the world around them.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

William Kamkwamba and his first windmill in Malawi.

I just finished reading an incredibly inspiring book called “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.” It’s the story of a young man named William Kamkwamba, who helps supply electricity to his family’s home in Malawi by building a windmill.   Because of a shortage of money, he is forced to drop out of school.  His technical knowledge comes from books that he checks out of his local library.  He rummages for parts in the village dump and cobbles together his windmill in part from a bicycle dynamo.  The amount of adversity he must overcome in order to get the windmill working is incredibly humbling.

Right now our 6th grade technology class is working on developing their own alternative energy devices as a collaborative project with their 6th grade goLEAD class.  We are currently communicating with global partners and learning the 3-D design tool Sketchup, which we will use to develop 3-D printed prototypes.

This book reminded me how much you can do with so little.  It made me think about the true spirit of what we call “maker” education: student-directed, problem-oriented, and hands-on.  I encourage you to watch William Kamkwamba’s TED Talk or check out the children’s version of his book.