Week+12+Reflection

I spent this week preparing for the USU Engineering and Science Day we had on the 24th.

This was an opportunity to help the teachers explore several different technologies and learn to teach them to the students. The equipment was supplied by the USU team. Lesson plans were on the internet. Most of the teachers were very excited and thrilled to have this experience. Some were loud and long in their complaints, but they were thrilled when it was over. There was a lot to learn for some of them.

The one thing that I hope that USU will do to improve this program is use some resources they have available to them in their own school. If they will work with the Core Academy that comes out of USU, to coordinate their lessons better with the core, that would be a vast improvement. Some of the lessons did not have a clear objective.

It would not take a lot of effort to over come these small imperfections. The improvement of the quality would be vast.

Some teachers had difficulty working out their fears of new material. In the end, though, the entire effort was so well received. I think that we will have them back next year, it was such a success.

There were experiences in making rain, studying water history in the west, making and firing litter bottle rockets, making hurricanes in a bottle, simulating earth quakes, building buildings and estimating cost of construction. The list went on for 24 different titles and that was not the limit of what they had to offer. Teachers had the opportunity to chose lessons they thought might fit with their curriculum. Most of them did pretty well. The others needed a little better explaination of what was happening.