Collab Lab 65: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs January 16, 2025January 16, 2025Outreach, Robotics, UWM, water

Capacity Building as an Outreach Strategy

The Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin’s mission to advance freshwater education and research relies on attracting and developing talented individuals who are passionate about water science. The conventional approach to community outreach is traditionally focused on the delivery of programming — offering experiences or content to K-12 teachers and students through curriculum, site visits, summer camps, or other activities.

We worked with the Freshwater Collaborative to use our December Collab to explore a different approach. We view teachers, students, and schools not simply as recipients of programming, but as potential partners that can support and extend the work of Freshwater Collaborative members. This model empowers K-12 schools to become active partners in research and education, creating experiential learning opportunities that benefit both students and researchers.

To provide a concrete basis from which to explore this approach to engagement, we framed the discussion around a budding collaboration between Dr. Ashley Lemke, an underwater archeologist working out of UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences, and Peter Graven, a middle school science and high school robotics teacher from St. Francis. Over the past several years, his students have developed underwater ROV’s of increasing sophistication. The immediate opportunity is to deploy an ROV in service of Dr. Lemke’s research. The bigger vision is to develop additional capabilities at St. Francis and other schools to serve the specific needs of FCW researchers and its partners.

Discussion

The set-up for our discussion centered on a single faculty member working with an individual teacher on a specific project. What came out of that was a number of insights about how and where those efforts could catalyze opportunities for other K-12 teachers and schools, as well as faculty pursuing other research interests.

We split the attendees into four discussion groups, each focused on a different capacity needed to allow a K-12 school, to support research efforts of Dr. Lemke. These included:

An ability to engineer, prototype, and test components
An ability to collect images, data, water, and sediment samples
An ability to provide ongoing monitoring of conditions
An ability to document findings, tell, and share a story

A fifth set of needed abilities we had not planned to introduce as part of the discussion, was nonetheless covered as part of a broader conversation between discussion groups:

An ability to deploy, operate, and maintain an ROV

The discussion which followed covered opportunities to directly engage students, the importance of cultivating a sense of wonder, and the importance of soft skills — the ability of students to work effectively as a team to take on any of these challenges.

Across the participants we saw interest and excitement around:

The types of collaboration that might ensue
What K-12 students might gain from the experience
What individual participants or organizations might be able to do to support the efforts of Dr. Lemke and Mr. Graven directly, or to support FCW/K-12 collaboration in another area.

Given the discussion at the Collab Lab and follow-up conversations we see six areas to build upon to validate and scale the approach we’ve suggested, starting in the spring 2025 semester.

Facilitate the work of Dr. Lemke and Mr. Graven
Share that story as it evolves
Identify opportunities for other schools to support this effort
Identify additional opportunities for collaboration
Recruit participation from additional K-12 schools
Understand and document what has enabled this initial collaboration and a path forward to extend the depth and reach of these efforts

Notes From Initial Brainstorming

Ability to engineer prototype and test components

Teachers need to have a framework/plan to structure students’ learning experiences to develop their design & making skills
Teachers need to be able to and actually model failure & Learning so that students know what it looks like and what it produces
Students need self awareness & self management skills to monitor and adjust their emotions to persist and create
Students need to have practices or skills to stretch their thinking and ideate broadly so their ideas break new ground
Students need to be able to sketch/model their ideas so they can discuss and make
Students need to have clarity about the connection between the design and real world application so they can test effectively
Students need to have multiple experiences of the make-test-revise cycle and feel a sense of accomplishment and to believe there is value in failure
Students need to be able to see their efforts and failure as a part of a lifelong learning journey so they persist and learn
Students need to be able to let go of their ideas and take an adversarial approach to find flaws so they can go farther faster
Students need to develop an appreciation for the discomfort that comes from presenting their ideas, getting, feedback, being wrong, and being uncertain so they remain open to growth
All parties deal with failure — playing it safe leads to not enough prototyping

Ability to collect images, data, water, and sediment samples

Modular construction for multiple purposes — right tool for the tasks
Generalized tool vs specific tasks
Photography
Lighting
High quality camera
Shutter speed
Video vs photos
Coring
Water Samples
Sterility, DNA,
Grabber hand for artifacts
Mapping
Endless types of data (interdisciplinarity) to collect. Explore & let the science happen– don’t lock yourself in too soon
Underwater mechanics important to take into account
Streamlined
Multi-perspective
balanced/shifting balance
Transform something that works on land to something that works underwater
Research & Art
Videography – stabilization of film (See film all too clear film)
Need to know where you are
explore/make questions
Underwater special challenges
Design thinking
Project management
Give up control
Deal with failure
Visual thinking
Resilience

Ability to provide ongoing monitoring

A Reason Why
Creativity – draw from other disciplines
Story purpose
Community
Contributing (leads to story)
Reasons to do it in a certain way — e.g. being scientific
Model scenarios for winter tests
simulations
Drill through pond ice (winter strategy to get out on smaller lakes)
Big challenge is precise location
Get practice in an accessible way –virtual simulations, small scale trials
Data logging
System for submitting and maintaining data
Decentralized
out of silo
People doing a part of a bigger, longer term effort
Possibly revolving group with new comers
Internal story telling to bring in new participants
Data logging – consistent methods
What story are we trying to tell?
Knowing who the community is
Virtual training/accessibility

Ability to document findings, tell and share a story

Wonderment
Speak/voice
Listen
Kids speak
Share a story — kids, teachers, families
Kids — visual communication/posters/art
Cyclical feedback/revision
37 sec reels [how things work]
Local pride/trust
clubs

Ability to operate an ROV

Put in
Take out
Know where I am
Know what I’m seeing
Maneuver reliably
Maintain it
Clean
Repair
Train other operators
Make use of a test environment to improve skills

A special thanks to our featured guests,

Peter Graven — Science & Robotics, St Francis School District

Marissa Jablonski – Executive Director, Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin

Ashley Lemke — Associate Professor – Anthropology, UW Milwaukee

As always, we’re appreciative of MSOE for letting us make use of the NM Lab in the WE Energies STEM Center every month.

Up Next

Collab Lab 66: Engaging Families Thursday February 13th, 5:30 to 8:30 pm at MSOE’s STEM Center

Actively using some form of PBL with your students and looking for ideas or encouragement from others? Consider joining your peers in the inspirED Community.

Collab Lab 63: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs October 29, 2024October 29, 2024Brave Conversations, Student Voice, UWM

The ability of teachers and students to engage effectively in difficult conversations, across that gap or amongst peers is central to creating the kinds of opportunities we want for students. At a bare minimum, those skills are needed to offer and receive effective feedback on student’s work. They are even more important if we want to engage students (and teachers) on challenging topics or to drive change within their school or in the broader community. The centrality of those skills seemed like a good place to kick off our 9th season of Collab Labs.

On October 10th we gathered at UWM’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center for Collab Lab 63 and a discussion focused on Empowering All Voices. Our work for the evening engaged participants to map factors that allow all voices to participate in brave conversations.

The maps shown here were captured and included here unedited. The primary two goals of creating this experience for the attendees were to:

Discuss and reflect on what group members with different backgrounds but shared purpose consider relevant factors and how they relate and impact each other.
Reflect on how you would apply the insights generated to your own ‘self-management’ in a group setting with familiar and unfamiliar participants.

We did not explicitly ask attendees to consider a K12 setting with teacher-student(s) and teacher-teacher interactions. We are in the process of integrating these maps into our larger model, and will share that work in a subsequent post.

What do you see in the maps when you look a bit more closely? Are there commonalities that stand out to you?
What would be a question you might ask (one of the teams) to help connect some dots or further complete the map?

Thanks again to our Featured Participants:

Thanks also to Ben Trager from UWM’s Center for Student Experience & Talent for hosting us at UWM, and to his Ed Policy students who were a great addition to the conversation.

Join us on November 14th for Collab Lab 64: Place Based Engagement

UWM Architecture Students Supporting 25 Teachers in 17 Schools

Pete Reynolds Blog, Experiments February 16, 2024February 19, 2024Arch 302, Architecture, near peer mentors, UWM

We’re in our second year of a working with Arijit Sen’s Architecture & Human Behavior class (Arch 302) at UWM. In collaboration with UWM’s Center for Student Experience & Talent (SET), we’ve placed the 150+ Arch 302 students in service learning roles with 25 teachers in 17 area schools, and with us. The focus of students’ work for Arch 302 is the design of learning spaces, and the 1-2 hours per week they each spend to support teachers and students serves as a field experience and preparation for their design challenge. Over the course of the semester, In teams of 2-3, Arch 302 students will develop design proposals to better address the needs of teachers, students, and staff who use the classrooms Arch 302 students are supporting. At five of those schools, teams are supporting teachers and students who have take on a parallel design challenge at their school. The two teams placed with us are focused on the room we use for most of our Collab Labs at MSOE’s STEM Center.

The framework we have in place for this effort creates wins all around– a richer experience for Arch 302 students, classroom support for teachers and schools, and exposure to new ways schools might look at the learning spaces they offer. Beyond all of that, given the number of Arch 302 students involved, roughly 2,500 K-12 students most of whom are in majority minority schools with high percentages of students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, have weekly exposure to a young person pursuing the field. For an industry with a shocking lack of diversity, this is a big step in building a pipeline of talent that looks a lot more like Milwaukee.

This collaboration was made possible because Professor Sen had a vision for what it could mean for his students, SET had processes in place to match UWM students to placement opportunities, and we’ve built up a big enough network of schools and teachers that we could find placements for everyone in such a large class. We’re continuing to explore how we can continue to sustain and leverage this model. if you’d like to get involved, let us know.

UWM School of Architecture Hosts Golda Meir Students

Pete Reynolds Blog December 7, 2023January 3, 2024Architecture, UWM

On Monday UWM’s School of Architecture (SARUP) hosted more than 40 middle and high school students from Golda Meir who are participating in our learning space design challenge. Members of UWM’s AIA student chapter led students on a tour of the building and supported Golda students in a hands on design challenge facilitated by Linda Keane from Next.cc

The session gave students a chance to think through some of the changes they might explore for learning spaces at Golda as well as a view into the work of SARUP students. Over the course of the spring semester Golda students will have the regular support of SARUP students in their classroom as they work through their designs. SARUP students enrolled in Arch 302 (Human Factors) will offer their time in a service learning role to gain a first hand look at how learning spaces function in preparation for the designs they will develop for the schools they serve.

Coal Handling Virtual Design Review

Pete Reynolds Blog, Zoo Train May 8, 2020May 12, 2020MSOE, UWM, Zoo Train Challenge

Covid-19 threw a wrench in our plans for the final design review for students engaged in our Zoo Train Challenge. MSOE had planned to play host for the session, but as schools and universities first closed and then moved on-line we adjusted as well.

As schools reopened for distance learning, five teams were able to continue work on the challenge to redesign the process used to store and load coal for the Zoo’s steam locomotives. In most cases, they were forced to do so without the resources and physical prototypes they had started to produce. On Wednesday, four teams were able to join a review session on Zoom where they presented their ideas to and took questions from a review panel representing the advisory team for the project. That group included industry professionals from We Energies, Kumatsu, County Materials, as well as faculty and staff from MSOE and UWM’s College of Engineering & Applied Science.

While the virtual format was less than ideal, two things stood out across the presentations. All of the teams were able to leverage feedback and ideas from the conceptual design review UWM hosted in December to improve not just their designs, but their ability to talk through and communicate their design decisions. When asked by panelists about where they saw value in the experience, students consistently mentioned both the experience of figuring out how to work effectively as a team, and the opportunity to leverage and learn from outside experts.

Congratulations are due to all of the teams involved in the project. Thanks are also due to their teachers. Nothing interesting happens in a classroom without a teacher willing to say yes. Their willingness to involve their students in an open ended project, coordinate student participation in project events, and help their colleagues at other schools with ideas on how to manage project teams is the key ingredient in efforts like this.

Zoo Train Schools and Teachers

Elmbrook Launch – Ryan Osterberg
Golda Meir – Tina Gleason
Menomonee Falls – Robert Regent-Smith
New Berlin Eisenhower – Devin McKinnon
New Berlin West – Bill Trudell
Pathways High School – Angelique Byrne/Chris Kjaer
St. Joan Antida – Cynthia McLinn/Melissa Peppler
St. Thomas More – Emily Pirkl
Wauwatosa East – Julibeth Favour
West Allis Dottke – Bernie McCarthy

UWM Hosts Occupational Ergonomics Sessions for Zoo Train Students

Pete Reynolds Zoo Train September 18, 2019October 18, 2019UWM

Students from seven area high schools met a UWM yesterday for a session on occupational ergonomics lead by Madiha Saeed Ahmed from UWM’s College of Engineering. The students are part of this year’s Zoo Train Engineering Challenge, will is focused on improving the coal handling process for the Zoo’s steam locomotives.

The current process is to manually sift coal into buckets which can weigh 90 pounds when full. These are carried down an uneven walkway along the tracks where they are staged until needed. When the train staff need to re-load coal for the train, the buckets are dumped into the train’s tender, through an opening that is close to four feet off the ground. Needless to say, plenty of issues to look at.

UWM Hosts Construction Drawing Workshop

Pete Reynolds Zoo Train July 20, 2019October 18, 2019UWM

Over the past two weeks. with support from Building2Learn, UWM hosted a construction drawing workshop where students from five area schools learned how to use Revit to model the new water tower design for the Zoo. The class was led by Jian Zhao, an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering. 10 Students from Bay View, Brown Deer, Carmen, Messmer and Obama high schools participated in the two week program, mixing work with Revit with visits to the UWM’s engineering labs and makerspace.

Prior to the workshop, Justin Spaeth offered students a half day crash course on Revit to ensure they could hit the ground running at UWM. The process Professor Zhao led students through, starting from scratch on the model each day, allowed them to rapidly learn how to use effectively use the tool. Early the second week, I found students talking through the advantages of modeling one component as a beam vs a column. by the end of the session, most were able to model the entire tower in about two hours.

The support from Building2Learn included help with transportation and a stipend for students. Next step — map out the fabrication process!

UWM Hosts Zoo Train students, lets them break things

Pete Reynolds Initiatives, Zoo Train January 25, 2019January 28, 2019Franklin, UWM

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.

Collab Lab 24 Recap

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs January 21, 2019January 21, 2019Groundwork Milwaukee, LISC, maps, Marquette, MMSD, Reflo, UWM, Zoo

Maps as a Point of Engagement

The idea for session came out of conversations we had last summer with Donna Genzmer and Kate Madison faculty members at UWM. Kate and Donna run UWM’s Power of Data Teacher Workshops. The Power of Data (POD) Project offers a 35 hour professional development program in mid-June that helps secondary teachers enhance existing lessons with Geospatial Inquiry. Through NSF funding the program is both free for teachers and offers a stipend to participants. We thought it would be useful to offer teachers interested in exploring how to leverage maps/Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools a chance to explore some ideas, and connect with resources early in the year so they might better be able to leverage the PODs training.

Milwaukee has a wealth of GIS talent at area universities, industries, and non-profits. Our featured participants brought a broad range of expertise and practical knowledge in the use of GIS/spatial data analysis across a variety of domains. We structured the session to allow participants to share their interests in exposing students to spatial data, explore ideas for potential projects, and solicit advice for how to make that happen.

That covered some pretty broad territory:

Neighborhood asset mapping
Macro economic data to map micro space
Conservation/spatial learning re Zoo animals
Connections to Math (social justice)
Viable composting sites
Linking environmental issues through maps
Past/present/future of place
Location of “good” landlords/housing
Location of bird houses
Parent pickup
Crime geography/address social justice
Locations for mobile maker space visits
Place of residence w/respect to school
Invasive/native plant distribution
Land and resource usemap
Suburban/urban agriculture
Watershed education
Green infrastructure
Food deserts
Location for community gardens
Data visualization
Develop GIS Apps w/IT/GIS skills
Freshwater connections
Connect people to water resources
Rainwater flow
Safety
Waste stream
Climate
Location of Companies

Upcoming workshops:

Milwaukee Community Map

Tuesday February 19th
4:30 to 5:30 PM
Arts@Large – 908 S. 5th Street, Milwaukee
details

PODS Workshops

UWM POD Workshop #1
June 3 — 7, 2019, UWM Library

UWM POD Workshop #2
June 17 — 21, 2019, UWM Library

details

Thanks again to The Commons for providing the space and to Marvin and our featured participants for the experience and insight they brought to the discussion:

Emily Champagne – GIS Supervisor, Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD)
Donna Genzmer, GISP – Director, Cartography & GIS Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Auriana Gilliland-Lloyd – Conservation Assistant, Bonobo & Congo Biodiversity Initiative, Zoological Society of Milwaukee
Lawrence Hoffman – GIS Program Manager, Groundwork Milwaukee
Beth Haskovec – Program Officer, LISC Milwaukee
Kate Madison – Policy Analyst, UWM’s Center for Economic Development
Dr. Aleksandra Snowden Ph.D. – Assistant Professor Social & Cultural Sciences, Marquette University
Michael Timm – Reflo/Milwaukee Community Map

Collab Lab 23 Recap

Pete Reynolds Collab Labs December 14, 2018December 16, 201888.9 Labs, Brinn Labs, Immersive Media Lab, Islands of Brilliance, Kohl's, MIAD, Open Lab, The Commons, UWM

The idea for last night’s Collab Lab came from Chris Willey after a conversation we had last summer. Chris runs UWM’s Immersive Media Lab, and had recognized that there are a bunch of organizations in Milwaukee doing interesting work in innovation and entrepreneurship at the edges of K-12. He suggested we use one of this season’s Collab Lab as a way to help educators understand what the organizations are up to, and uncover areas for collaboration. We started with a list of organizations– UWM’s Immersive Media Lab, MIAD’s Open Lab, Kohl’s Innovation Center, The Commons, 88.9 Labs, Islands of Brilliance, Brinn Labs, and brought a group together to talk through what this might look like.

Collab Lab regulars know that our aim is not to talk at attendees, but to foster conversation among them, so a series of presentations was out from the start. Since real collaboration requires alignment of more than just short term interests. Real collaboration comes out not just shared goals, but shared values.

This notion gave us both the first step in our process– having participants describe what it is that drives the work they do– and the idea to have Marvin Pope come in as a guest facilitator. Marvin’s passion is helping others understand and share their purpose, so it was a natural fit. We were delighted that agreed to do so and was willing to work with us to refine the process he’d lead participants through.

Here’s where we landed…

To start, Marvin asked each participant to capture in a sentence or two, their purpose, and the work they do that is guided by that purpose. Participants then shared what they had written, first with whomever they were seated next to, and then within their discussion group. Here’s some of what participants shared:

I’m on a mission to connect math teachers and transform classrooms
To facilitate others to become life-long learners
To expose students to opportunities and experiences
Helping students and teachers rethink learning through new means of instruction and student centered practices

We followed that by asking participants to note what they need to keep moving forward with their work. This too was done first individually, and then shared within the discussion group. One of the goals here was to illustrate that it is not just educators who need help getting to where they want to be. Representatives from each of the organizations were part of each discussion group, and they talked through their purpose, work and needs as well. Here we heard things like:

A support system that believes in the work I do
Teachers willing to collaborate
Ideas and perspectives that augment my own

In past sessions when we’ve led discussions about how to move past barriers, these focused on the common barriers to common goals of the participants. Last night we focused on the specific needs of each participant. Participants had been documenting their thoughts on paper form we created for the session. At this point we everyone pass their forms to the right, to gather ideas from each of the other participants within their discussion group. Once those made it all the way around the table, we let the groups talk through what they had written. The most interesting feedback I got was after the session ended when one attendee, commenting on this process noted “I was expecting a lot of You shoulds. What came back was a lot of I can help withs.”

We wrapped up the process by having attendees jot down what their path forward now looks like. At the end, the form they completed, told the story of the purpose behind their work, the hurdles they face, the help they can get within the community, and where that help will take them. We invited participants to share their story with the group as a whole, by posting their form on the wall, or telling their story on a digital voice recorder to be shared more broadly.

Sorry, no big, overall summary of the discussion to report, just the good news that the process seemed to spark a lot of ideas around how attendees may work together to get where they want to be.