Teaching Fifth Graders Engineering 156
Jamie noticed a NYT story saying "To compete in a global economy, some school districts are offering engineering lessons to students in kindergarten. " The story is about 5th graders working on a new experimental curriculum that is well beyond the egg drop of old.
Re:He Huffed and he Puffed.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:He Huffed and he Puffed.... (Score:1, Informative)
All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C’s of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum.
RTFA
FWIW, I started in preschool
Re:Parents are the Biggest Factor (Score:4, Informative)
I heartily agree.
From my own history I see a direct result of this kind of early brain-building.
My family purchased a computer (Commodore 64) when I was about 7, my mom sat down and showed me how to write basic code just by going through the examples in the book that came with it. At first it was just an endless print loop with my name in it, but soon it became little "20 questions" type games and then more and more.
I have no doubt the reason I am a programmer today is because of the education and support from my family at an early age and also the encouragement to excel and keep exploring.
I also learnt quite a bit about basic electronics from those old Radio Shack kits.
Summary is confusing... had to read TFA (Score:5, Informative)
(Damnit, what is slashdot coming to?)
Anyways.... fifth graders are not in kindergarten (or at least, they damn well shouldn't be!)
At least the article was a lot less confusing by saying they are teaching it to levels from kindergarten through grade 5.
Absolutely possible, however (Score:2, Informative)
In the old days, you went to university at what - 14? However, very few went there.
The "problem" with this is that modern schooling of the social-democratic form has emphasised equality and coherence - hence, the class largely progresses for the first 10 years, up until you can get some differentiation, at the learning speed of the moderate-to-slow student. This is a conscious choice. Not to intentionally "keep people stupid", but because childhood is seen by many as a period to mess around and have fun and learn a bit, and by others that if you separated people in classes by ability it would be a gargantuan step towards a formalised "class system".
I remember in 4th grade, when I finished my class mathematics book in 2 months. What did they give me to do? Page upon page upon page (an I mean literally, something like 5 per maths hour) of questions that were of an IDENTICAL DIFFICULTY so that we wouldn't "progress beyond the rest of the class". One other person in the class was the same (and later ended up at Microsoft, a brilliant programmer but a social wreck), and we would compete for the number of sheets of identical-level calculations we could go through per hour. Not to mention, this caused a level of boredom and anguish at times which was a bit like getting stabbed in the eye and suffering literally a brain implosion, but it was all both planned and justified by the 'egalitarianism' perspective. I believe the US is different from Europe in that you have at least some form of 'bright students classes', whilst this is extremely rare in Europe.
So it's a tradeoff and a decision to make. Will you separate out the brighest students, give them more attention and better tutoring, with the hopes that they do great things for your nation? Or won't you? There are a large number of people in the academic world arguing for either.
LEGO League (Score:4, Informative)
If it held together, he nodded, then pulled the robot up and down. If it came apart, he handed the 'bot back to the team with two words: "Vertical stresses."
If the robot could handle stress, he asked to see what it could do on the scoring table.
He also made sure that there were cookies, sometimes, and drinks.
Good times, those.
Re:He Huffed and he Puffed.... (Score:3, Informative)
It's CmdrTaco's commentary that is wrong, the summary and grandparent is correct.
From the article:
To start, he needed to get past a voice-activated security gate, find a hidden door and negotiate a few other traps in a house that a pair of kindergartners here imagined for the pigs — and then pieced together from index cards, paper cups, wood sticks and pipe cleaners.
The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum.
Re:Do it Mythbuster Style! (Score:4, Informative)
also encourages them to be critical of pre-conceived ideas.
That is not going to fly in the bible belt.
Locally they call it the "Science Technology Engineering Math curriculum", often referred to locally as "The jobs that have gone to India curriculum" or the "future downsized/unemployed of America curriculum".
It seems like a cargo cult, perhaps if we just tried harder to indoctrinate our youth into textile work or manufacturing, then those jobs would have magically stayed onshore ... because, uh ... because we wished really hard.
Re:Not sure how this helps, but it's a good idea! (Score:3, Informative)
All tertiary sector jobs, and all of them go away, eventually, after the primary and secondary sector go away. So, since we've destroyed the primary and secondary sectors, tertiary should be going away shortly.
Law is not so healthy, no way for recent grads to be hired or pay off their loans. A dying industry.
Medicine will collapse once no one can afford it anymore. We are in in that process, right now.
Exec management is a great solution for approx 0.001% of the population, the other 99.999% can starve, I guess.
Investment banking probably mortally wounded over the last couple years. Only makes financial sense when the net population is pouring money into the stock market via retirement funds... and once the baby boomers retire and start a net pull out of the market, then a decades long bear market and a drought of IPOs is inevitable.
Mismanagement/consulting, well, dead primary and secondary companies don't need managers or consultants, and soon dead tertiary companies won't either.
Entertainment/sports, again a great solution for approx 0.001% of the population, the other 99.999% can starve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_sector_of_the_economy [wikipedia.org]