August 25 – October 16, 2020
In partnership with Open Artful Streets, we designed and taught a six-week afterschool course for kids ages 9 –14 and their caregivers. Students built automated hand sanitizing stations for local businesses.
The final products — electronic devices that play music and squirt sanitizer — are now in daily use in local businesses in Brattleboro, VT.
“What a teacher . . . my son is completely jazzed about being one of the child scientists tinkering with breadboards and micro:bits to power pumps that go on sanitizer stations that play music. If you find this amazing and a bit crazy . . . so do I! But it works!” — Peter Siegel, Brattleboro, VT
Pixels to Pictures: Resolution
Debut: December 18, 2020
This interactive lesson for high school classrooms is on PBSLearningMedia.org. It allows students to explore the concept of resolution. Students look for the presence of pixels in digital images and consider the benefits and drawbacks of higher-resolution images and their computer files.
We designed the module to align with NGSS:
Grade Level Disciplinary Core Idea HS-PS4.A.5: “Information can be digitized (e.g., a picture stored as the values of an array of pixels); in this form, it can be stored reliably in computer memory and sent over long distances as a series of wave pulses.”
and
Science and Engineering Practices Appendix F: SEP.1.a.4: “Ask questions to clarify and refine a model, an explanation, or an engineering problem.”
May 2016 – Present
High Schoolers build, sew, and hack electronics into everyday objects for the purpose of artfully designing tools that explore interaction with the world. This interdisciplinary offering introduces embedded computing, basic electronics, and some mechanical engineering. No experience necessary.
Over the past five years, kids have come up with some pretty strange devices — an automated cat dancer, hands-free table radio, safe driving sensor in a steering wheel, musical robot, and a disembodied hand that greets people.
I designed and have implemented this course at The Putney School in Vermont during the school year and summer sessions. The Putney School is an independent high school whose science department has an emphasis on student agency in pursuing ambitious, student-defined science and engineering goals.
An Engineering Design Program in Partnership with The New York Hall of Science and WGBH Educational Foundation
As Editorial Project Manager from 10/18 – 01/20, I prototyped materials that would support families taking part in the engineering design process at home and in community spaces. This project is due to go live across six different museum and maker space sites in 2021!
Track Design Squad Maker at NYSCI.
This slideshow appears on PBSLearningMedia and includes suggested questions and a handout.
“For hundreds of years, people only saw visible light when they studied distant stars and galaxies through telescopes. But visible light is just one kind of light on the electromagnetic spectrum. Using only visible light to study the universe would be like going to the zoo and seeing only the elephant’s feet (and then having to guess what the rest of the animal looks like).
“Scientists now study objects in space using non-visible light, such as X-rays or radio waves. They pick a color to present the data. These are called “false-color” images, like the ones in the slideshow.”
This interactive lesson for high schoolers and its teacher’s guide was designed and written in collaboration with celebrated architect and public artist Maya Lin. It draws on Lin’s What Is Missing? website to engage students in building a biodiversity timeline for a species present in their own community.
Students using their timelines to identify and evaluate solutions for reducing human impacts on the environment and biodiversity. Using examples from the What Is Missing? project, students learn how various kinds of data and information can be gathered to create a biodiversity timeline that serves as evidence of changes in a population of a species.
Visit the lesson here.
For this award-winning PBS TV show and afterschool program, we created six original engineering challenges for kids 9-14. We redesigned and rewrote the student and educator guides to support a national program of hundreds of Design Squad groups.
Highlights include sessions in which kids use the engineering design process to create better athletic shoes or optimize wind turbines to capture the most wind energy. All the engineering challenges use free or low-cost materials found around the house.
Access the guides here.
