STEM
Comes to New Holland-Middletown School
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[November 16, 2015]
LINCOLN
- STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) class has come to
New Holland-Middletown! Already a 1:1 school (every student has
their own iPad or Chromebook laptop) for over two years, the first
Google Apps for Education district in Logan County is now offering a
semester-long STEM class to district middle schoolers.
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Miss Hannah Durchholz, Junior High Science and Math teacher at New
Holland-Middletown, is taking advantage of this semester-long
enrichment course to provide students with hands-on learning,
real-world connections, and creative approaches to problem-solving.
Using innovative equipment such as a Makey-Makey station where
students program movements in a code, all while obeying laws of
electricity grounding and insulation. In the provided picture,
students wrote a code for Pac-Man’s movements, based on which
students’ hands were grounded from the current supplied by the
Makey-Makey, which was plugged into the students’ laptop. For
example, to move Pac-Man to the right, one particular student had to
be “high-fived” while in order to move him down, a different student
had to have their hand clapped.
While not overly complex to play, the creation of this “code” by
NH-M sixth-graders showed how engaged students could become by
providing their own direction for their learning.
As the semester continues, students will be designing and
engineering by utilizing TinkerCAD software and 3-D printers, as
well as writing lessons for Hour of Code, which occurs in
mid-December and other activities associated with making.
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STEM class was recently added to New Holland-Middletown’s “exploratory” course
lineup in the wake of statistics that show 1.2 million unfilled STEM jobs by
2018. Additionally, the higher order thinking skills that students are required
to apply in solving complex STEM problems challenge students enough to keep them
intellectually engaged, thereby ensuring the skills and content are not only
learned, but mastered.
[NH-M Superintendent Todd Dugan]
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