Accelerating Innovation in Milwaukee Area Schools
The weather was less than ideal, but the Public Math booth was there for the Doors Open Milwaukee Block party. Visitors had the chance to play with math actives and test their Venn diagramming skills with a street survey.
Our math booth was out at Maker Faire this weekend testing out activities with kids and families. Mary Langmyer brought her enthusiasm and wagon full of materials to engage students in math explorations.
Family/date night math came to the NEWaukee Night Market last night. Math educators Mary Langmyer and David Temple created opportunities for attendees to solve number puzzles, play with shapes, build nets with Magnatiles, use “shape finders” and participate in our first “street survey”. It was a chance to engage with math (and mathematicians) in playful and creative ways as well as chance to meet others who stopped by for positive math experiences! All in all, a night of great (and humorous) conversations and learning for everyone!
Following on from discussions with COA staff earlier in the summer, Collab-Labist Mary Langmyer set up a number of math activities for COA’s family picnic. Children had fun with the chance to play number games, count collections, create number sentences, build with blocks, make patterns and design attribute trains…and play with bubbles! It was a great day to sit down and relax with new friends… while using one’s imagination to engage with math!
Last night Silver Spring Neighborhood Center held a family night for parents in the neighborhood or whose children attend Browning Elementary School. As part of the activities they planned for the evening, we brought along some math activities to see what children were inspired by.
The playground at Browning has a number spiral that to date had been used as the place to pile coats while playing elsewhere on the playground. Last night we proposed rules for some games students might play using a pair of large foam dice to figure their next move.
The big hit of the evening were the Zometool bubble wands students built.
It was a beautiful evening to watch bubbles drift across the playground, or when the breeze calmed, observe the structures created within a wand. A student was heard to say “that’s a tetrahedron!”
On May 2nd, UWM hosted the final design review for students participating in our challenge to design a replacement for the wooden water tower that services the Zoo’s steam locomotives. Teams presented their designs to a review panel that included:
Over lunch, the review panel identified key concepts to include in the final specification. This list included contributions from all of the participating teams.
Brett Peters, Dean of the School of Engineering provided closing remarks.
We’re grateful to have the help of Jason Gross from Graef to finalize the spec and provide the engineering analysis on the final design. This summer, through the support of Building2Learn, UWM will host a two week workshop for a group of students from area high schools to produce construction drawings for the new tower.
This fall we’ll work with a schools to fabricate components for the tower. That will also see the kick off of our next challenge — design of a coal handling system to replace the current manual process.
If you’d like to get your school or company involved in the initiative, let us know. Here’s how.
On Thursday UWM’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences hosted the first of three sessions for students in our Zoo Train challenge. We met in the College’s new maker space where students from Franklin High School used short lengths of lath to assemble beams of various configurations. With these in hand, students went from there to the structural testing lab where UWM faculty had students estimate the maximum load their beam design could support. Each design was tested to the point of failure.
For round two, students went back to the maker space to design and assemble a five foot high tower from angle irons. That tower was put under load in a different device to measure deflection. The maximum load there was capped at twice the load the Zoo’s water tower needs to support.
UWM will host two more sessions to accomodate students from other schools. Thanks to the UWM team who made this happen: Chris Beimborn, Andrew Dressel, and Rahim Reshadi, and Avie Judes.
Our January session focused on what should happen between now and next fall for schools that want to expand the number of teachers using number talks as a regular practice or support an initial cohort of teachers willing to make that happen. Here’s where we landed:
Teams participating in our challenge to design a replacement for the wooden water tower that services the Zoo’s steam locomotives presented their concepts at MSOE on Monday. We have more than 65 students involved, representing ten teams from six high schools. Given the number of students involved, we ran parallel sessions for the reviews, with each team presenting before a panel that included civil engineers from Excel and MSOE, experts in railroad history from The Center for Railway Photography & Art and the Coalition for Sustainable Rail (our partner in this effort), and the staff which maintain and operate the Zoo’s train.
We asked teams to cover, not only their designs, but how they organized their efforts, alternatives they considered, and where they need additional help. Students from Elmbrook’s media program stepped up to record all of the presentations for students and teachers to review.
After a short break for lunch we pulled everyone back together for a recap session with all of the reviewers. That provided an opportunity for the panelists to summarize what they saw in their session within a few broad themes. One of the most interesting things for us was to see the different ways schools with larger groups organized their teams– by functional area of the tower, expertise of the team, member, or into smaller teams who would each produce a design concept. We used the recap session to engage students and teachers in a discussion of how that worked and what it felt like over the course of the semester.
We’re pulling the teachers together next week for a debrief to guide adjustments we’ll want to make as we go into the detailed design phase next semester. That work will begin and end with visits to UWM– first, for a chance to play in UWM’s structures lab, and, on May 2nd, for the detailed design review where the review panelists will select an approach to be fabricated and installed.
We are very grateful to MSOE for hosting the event and working with us to get everything in place. They provided a beautiful setting with the 4th floor conference area inside the Grohmann Tower.
The Journal Sentinel was also on hand to cover the event. You can find their write up here.
This month we joined the Milwaukee Area Math Council at City Lights Brewery for conversation about math and math education. We were also able to distribute copies of the latest version of our Number Talks quick reference card, which Milwaukee Succeeds had printed for us. We’ll have the final version laminated, but we’re taking advantage of a mix-up when the printer forgot to laminate these.
The unlaminated versions make it much easier for a teacher to highlight key things they want to pay attention to or write additional prompts. We’ll check back early next year with the teachers these have gone out to to see how they may have modified them and what other feedback they may have before we finalize the design.
If you would like to get a couple of the quick reference cards for yourself or colleagues, let us know. We’d love to hear what you think.
