Figured I ought to give everyone a look at the new classroom. I have not taken many pictures outside the room as a lot of it is still under construction, but hey, new building, hard to complain right? The building itself is amazing, and I will add a lot of photos of it when I get a chance, but I thought I would do a quick post and show everyone what the classroom looks like so far. I still have a lot of decorating to do to make it a proper "Tumin" classroom. AKA a coffee maker and tacky posters/post cards. All of my old students will understand this for sure. If you want to see google sphere of the room, click here. Google spheres are these awesome spherical photos of places that allow for a person to move the photo with their mouse or finger if it is on the cell phone. You can take a virtual spin around my room at your leisure.
The view from the front of the classroom towards the back.
The view out the window
The view from the back of the classroom towards the front
After a semester of promising that we would study parametric equations by launching items across the field at school, we have finally started out trebuchet project. After a few hours of discussion and watching some awesome YouTube videos in class, we compiled all of our ideas and hashed out which combinations of ideas would be the most effective for the materials and methods we were going to employ. This is the basic idea we have reached:
We decided that we were going to use some of the trees near campus to make the poles and created a "shopping list" of lengths that we would need. I thought it might be a more fun approach to use some of the old-school methods of building - lashing and other rope-work to make this project a bit more complex and allow them to learn a completely new skill.
So far it has been a roaring success. Kids are very excited to spend an hour or so a week working at our "workshop" which is located up near the field above campus, cleaning the fallen trees of their branches, learning to tie better knots and how to lash spars of wood together to create a medieval siege weapon.
While we will not be building a siege engine that is capable of launching a projectile into a castle, we sure will hope to clear 100 yards with a tennis ball sized item.
Hopefully the next week of construction goes well.
For those of you who do not know what a trebuchet is, check out the following YouTube video:
After a few long days of work on the trebuchets, we have made some serious progress. Thankfully we have had some really good weather and have been able to make headway while still being able to stick to our main plan. We have also been able to use some great ideas brought to the team by individuals during impromptu brainstorming sessions (aka when we are tired and taking a break).
So, as you can see, we have the main frame put together. We will be moving on to the arm and counterweight next time, along with securing that arm and a track for the sling later one. In one to two classes depending on our speed, we should have a fully functioning trebuchet.
We also have decided on a few backup plans just in case the trebuchet does not function all that well. If we are having issues with arm movement, we will be using pulleys instead of just a pure weight dropping style.
Hopefully we will have pictures of objects in flight in the next post or two.
The Bridge Project in my geometry class of 2014 was nothing short of amazing in both the complexity of some of the designs and the overall success of the students who participated in the project. The rules were very simple -
1. Use any materials that were provided to span a distance of 18 inches at a width of 4 inches.
2. You could use any design that you felt would best support the weight of textbooks as they were placed in the middle.
3. A bridge was considered broken when the books hit the floor. Bending and twisting was fine as long as the bridge survived and held the books up off the floor.
Of course all the students started off with some simple designs and with some prodding we were able to start to incorporate some of the better geometric shapes that one would see in simple trestle style bridges.
I warned them that there would be twists and that we would introduce rules that would either simplify or make the bridge building progress more complex depending on their ability to maneuver through the changing environment.
This project coincided with the history class learning about communism and capitalism during the cold war, so of course both the history teacher and myself decided that we had to figure out a way to separate the groups based on east/west and have them act out a bit of the Iron Curtain time period along with the differences between a simplistic capitalism and a simplistic communism style economies.
New rules were introduced. On an arbitrary day I told the classroom that the west side was not capitalist and the east side was communist and proceeded to give the capitalist side more sticks to solidify them as my "favorite group" and started to foment a bit of discord with the differences in the economies. I also allowed both side the ability to form "black markets" to sell items such as wood glue, foil, tape, and other construction materials to make their bridges better and stronger. This led them to having to make a choice between a large amount of sticks "materials" or a large amount of specialty items. Of course the currency was only in stick, and soon kids were trying to find ways to get more sticks for any little thing.
Now it was time to work on the communist side a little bit. The history teacher came in one day with a bag full of sticks and made an elaborate show of handing them out to only the groups that sided with him. We had some harsh words, (in jest of course), to build more tension and then he left.
The next history class I "air-lifted" in sticks to my groups while they were in his class. Harsh words ensued and the mood started to feel downright nationalistic. We then decided it was time for a propaganda campaign. Both sides were encouraged to have their own leaders who of course were paid for their services in sticks, and also worked to create a bit of discord and spy on the opposing sides. These groups held lunch rallies, and started taping up slogans and signs in the opposing classrooms.
The game was on.
After a great few weeks of teaching them both how easy it was to build micro-economies and how fast one can give into nationalistic zeal, it was time to do the best part of the project. Stack weight on the bridges until they gave way in a catastrophic failure that would get caught on slow-motion camera.
The video is about three minutes long and shows all the collapsing bridges. The winner held an amazing 190 pounds (me standing on it).
At the end of the unit we had a bit of reflection on how they felt about the project and how the economic systems played into it. Based on the feedback I am sure that the time period in history was much more interesting based on our cross-curricular approach.
