2016 Education

Page 10

2016 EDUCATION MAGAZINE

LINCOLN DAILY

NEWS.COM

March 1, 2016

STEM Comes to New

Holland-Middletown School

Todd Dugan

Superintendent

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.

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.

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.