Another fabulous day is in the books! Your students probably came home pretty tired today from all the intense, engaging, excitement they had today! The Yellow and Green groups had the pleasure of one of our alumni coming back all the way from Arizona to present today! She brought with her a slew of mathematical modeling activities, including using our 3D pens! Students had the opportunity to enhance their geometric and spatial reasoning skills in three-dimensions. They also got to work on their mathematical vocabulary and communication as they provided clues in the activities. Of course their favorite part was getting to use the 3D pens (if some are interested, this is the model we purchased and had the most success with – we tested 4 different ones!). They first used the pens to construct polyhedra and then they got to play around with the pen. We had some great and unique creations! 
The blue and red groups had a fascinating day with the geocaching (don’t worry I’ll let you ask your student what that is 🙂 ). They got to draw some “old style” maps (aka 2D) and then look at the mapping capabilities of Google Earth and it’s 3D visualizations. They found their houses and then went on a geocaching scavenger hunt on campus.
For robotics today they really dug deep into their beginning programming and challenges. Our robotics instructors created some awesome new mats and challenges this year to help guide them more with the programming, so they had a lot of fun getting their robots to drive through the mazes, knock over (empty) water bottles, and even spell out C-A-T-S CATS CATS CATS! There were lots of successes and we caught many of them on video. We’ll try to get all of those uploaded tomorrow for your viewing fun.
Tomorrow brings more mathematical modeling excitement for the red and blue groups and lear
ning about stereology in the yellow and green groups in the biology laboratory.
Your child(ren) will be working in groups all week long. The robotics groups are teams of 2 and will stay the same all week long, while the other groups formed will vary throughout the week. As the “real world” continues to become more team-work oriented, we want to help our students grow in that direction as well. We hope your child gets to work with a variety of students this week and in turn meets some great new friends!
In their words…
Red and Blue Groups:
- I learned what longitude and latitude means.
- I liked using Google Earth to find places.
- I think it was interesting because we got to use fun things with maps.
- I would like to learn more about geocaching, because I like being outdoors.
- (What I would like to learn more) What other kinds of designs I can do because I would like to do them as my house. [sic]
- I learned that 3D pens are the best thing that’s ever happened.
- We got to use a 3D pen! (And I got to keep what I made)
- We learned how to make 3D figures and made shapes with the 3D pens.
Conversation Starters…
Yellow/Green Groups:
- What polyhedra did you build today with your 3D pen?
- How successful were you and your partner at communicating during the mathematical challenges today?
- What challenges did you work on today in robotics? How comfortable are you with the programming now? What did you get your robot to do today?
- What was your favorite part about using the 3D pen?
Red/Blue Groups:
- What is geocaching? What makes it different than reading an “old, flat map”?
- What did you find in your geocaching scavenger today?
- What was your favorite part about working with Google Earth?
Photo(s) of the day… (excited and ready to move on the next part of the afternoon!) Click here to view the rest (our internet is being slow tonight so they are taking a while to load…sorry!)
