Robotics competition draws students from all over Texas

It makes me proud as an expatriate Texan to find that the state of Texas is one of those states that realizes STEM learning is important and is doing something to ensure that its students meet the educational requirements of the new millennium in science, technology, engineering and math.
The Vex competition at Roosevelt high school in San Antonio is a good example.
One of the teams in the event sponsored by the U.S Army was a Vex team from an all-girls robotics club at the school.
So seriously does the state of Texas view these competition that recently the Texas Workforce Commission funded a startup grant to help 400 new Vex robotics teams in Texas.
Sounds like a lot of teams, does it?  
Well countrywide 9000 Vex robotics teams are expected to compete in the USA this year.
Texas intends to have its share.

If you find yourself wondering what a Vex robotics team is, the VEX Robotics Design System is centered around the VEX Clawbot Kit.
The Clawbot is similar to the LEGO NXT in that assembly and disassembly is made simple with assorted pieces easily fitted together.  
Some say that the Clawbot is cheaper.

Edmodo Top 10 Paid Educational Apps

Following the popularity of our previous blog post about Edmodo top 10 free educational apps, we've gathered this time Edmodo top paid educational apps of 2013.

Edmodo Top 10 Free Educational Apps

Edmodo, as a free social learning platform for teachers to share content and manage student learning, offers over 500 educational apps.  

Each one of those educational apps was designed to include one or more of the following:

• Get students excited about learning in a familiar environment;
• For teachers - to continue classroom discussions online;
• Introduce polls to check for student understanding;
• Award badges to individual students based on performance or behavior;
• Connect teachers to their students, administrators, parents, and publishers
• Connect teachers to other teachers;
• Track students progress;
• Get the pulse of their classrooms through student reactions to quizzes, assignments, and discussion posts that capture understanding, confusion, or frustration.
• Personalize learning for every student;
• Help teachers to amplify their lesson plans;

The top 10 free educational apps of Edmodo 2013 are fully described below.

Here’s why we absolutely need EdTech

Here’s a question for you: What is your opinion as to the importance of EdTech in education? EdTech, as you know, is short for educational technology.

What defines EdTech, you ask?

Good question! You see the term everywhere but no definitions. So let’s go with the definition advanced by our good  friends at Wikipedia: "Educational technology, sometimes termed EdTech, is the study and ethical practice of facilitating e-learning, which is the learning and improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technological processes and resources…"  "Appropriate technological processes and resources" include more than just the Internet, although online courses are important tools; tablets, computers, cell phones, the whole digital zoo is included. Even robots! Especially robots!

To learn algebra secret way to student hearts

It's not a big secret, committed teachers have been aware of this forever. The best way to get students to learn anything about a subject is to find out what they are interested in and then show them how what interests them relates to the subject the teacher hopes to teach them. But like most things we believe instinctively it is always nice to find scientific proof for our beliefs.

Recently researchers using a Carnegie Learning software called cognitive tutor put high school students in two distinct groups to study Algebra. In one group were the students whose backgrounds had been researched in order to discover their personal interests. Stuff like music, movies and sports. These students received their algebra with lesson plans attuned to their personal interests. The second group was taught in the good old way math has always been taught, from a book and with no attention paid to the kids real lives. Can you guess what those researchers discovered? Exactly!

America Desperately Needs More STEM Students

Here is some interesting information on the future of STEM learning I found in a cool graphic illustration by First Book, a nonprofit social enterprise, that seems to indicate this country is heading for trouble in a few years, trouble brought about by our losing our edge as the world’s most technologically advanced nation.

It is expected that By 2018 there will be at least 8 million jobs in the US dependent on skills learned in STEM learning courses. Problem is, experts estimate that at least 3 million of those jobs will have to go to applicants from outside the US due to a shortage of qualified people here. Worse, the companies needing those workers might take the jobs elsewhere.

Why don’t we have enough qualified applicants in this country to supply our own employment need? We certainly have enough kids in school. In fact, each year over 1 million freshman high school students claim to be interested in a career requiring STEM skills. Unfortunately 60%--six out of ten--change their minds before graduation.

Why using arts to encourage more STEM learning

Is it really all that important that the "A" in Art education find its way into STEM learning and make STEAM? You bet! And as always there is a movement to do exactly that. I say "as always" because concerned individuals throughout history have attempted to merge the arts and the sciences.

Gamification STEM learning

Gamification, for those of you too busy earning a living and raising a family to keep up with the new words added almost daily to the popular tech lexicon, is a term first used by Nick Pelling a British computer programer in 2010. According to Wikipedia the term has come to mean "the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems".

So what does that mean in the context of STEM learning?

Applying Math curriculum to real life using Google SketchUp

Math in practical use as opposed to being practically useless.
That’s the approach taken by more and more math teachers.
Of course math was always useful in the real world; the trick was convincing your students that that was the case.
Hard to do when the curriculum and available tools limited teachers to books and the blackboard...Oh, and let us not forget transparent plastic protractors for drawing straight lines on paper...at least that’s what most of us used them for.
The only angle we thought about was a guy’s agenda as in “What’s his angle?,” not “the space (usually measured in degrees) between two intersecting lines or surfaces at or close to the point where they meet.”

What’s happened to change all that? Technology!
Technology has made all the difference in turning math class into a learning experience as practical as woodworking or auto repair.
And that's what eighth-graders and their teachers discovered at Upper DuPont Area Middle School in Loyalton, Pa. while undertaking the redesigning and landscaping of the schools courtyard.

Sailing into knowledge: Learning math and geometry on the ocean

Up until recently the concept of “learning math by doing it” meant some terminally embarrassed student standing in front of a class of tittering fellow students while desperately trying to solve a completely (to his life, at any rate) irrelevant problem, or that same student sitting home that night at his kitchen table trying to stay awake while solving one meaningless, irrelevant equation after another. His teacher hoped this process would result in the student memorizing math procedures and learning to perform them quickly and accurately.  Perhaps even becoming a math teacher himself.

What usually happened, however, was that he decided to dedicate his life to getting as far away from math as possible. He became an... an English major writing meaningless SEO blog posts that no one reads flogging products for some uncaring corporation, when he could have been looking for a cancer cure or charting a route to Mars.

But that was then and this is now! The rapid advance of technology and the absolute necessity of keeping this nation in a competitive position Vis-à-vis the rest of the world has forced many schools to create a more relevant math curriculum, thereby bridging the gap between math’s abstract concepts and reality and increasing relevancy. Our Sister’s School in New Bedford Massachusetts, for example, teaches the relevancy of math by way of the sailing ship. The young ladies learn the math behind tacking, the art of sailing against the wind.