• MICHIGAN HOME
• ARTICLES

Lincoln Middle School Students Learning Better Than Ever

 

            “The kids are getting remarkable results,” said Dianna Hinderer, a teacher of Project Lead the Way courses at the Lincoln Middle School in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Lincoln is in its very first year offering courses from Project Lead the Way, a highly successful, national program intended to develop more student interest in  Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM.) Four teachers teach the courses: Cindi Adcock, Bruce Breilein, Dianna Hinderer, and March Wells.

 

            “Active” is the only way to describe the students and teacher in March Wells’ class. Students form groups of three or four to work on different projects. In one corner, a group of boys is working on a poster about solar energy using images and information they obtained on-line. In another corner, students are disassembling what was once part of a large telescope. “We’re just taking it apart to see how it fit together,” they said.

            Another group goes out into the hallway to launch the model air racers they’ve designed to see how far and how fast they’ll travel. Most make it many yards down the hallway and are escorted with squeals of delight.

 

           A major project involves wooden boards, cardboard tubes, plastic rulers, and ping pong balls. This complex, Rube Goldberg-like project is their design solution to Mr. Wells charge to show energy transfer through a machine that matches up to another group’s similar effort. 

            Each time the ping pong ball is released down an inclined plane and travels over the boards through the course set up for it, the students watch to see just what needs to be changed and adjusted for the ball to travel faster, not go off course, or keep its momentum. Over a series of trials, the “bugs” are worked out of the course and the ball travels the length of the classroom.

            Besides energy transfer, another real lesson here is to show students how modifications made through trial and error testing are a key element of engineering progress.

 

            In Ms. Hinderer’s course, the atmosphere is different. All the students are seated before computer screens and the lights are low so Ms. Hinderer can project a power-point presentation. The class is discussing technology as a means to solve human needs & wants. Their last unit involved a “web quest” to find information about inventors and engineers.

 

            Gradually, the students are becoming more familiar with technology-related vocabulary. The students also worked on drafting in two-point perspective to design the air racers they would later build and test in Mr. Wells' class.

 

            “They’re getting results with the air racers,” Mr. Wells said. “They are learning to make modifications and about aerodynamics.”

            “Before, tech teachers didn’t have textbooks and had to discover ways to teach these ideas on our own,” Dianna Hinderer said. “The PLTW courses are a nice container for us that organize the concepts and hands-on practice in one place.” 

 

           The result of combining the background concepts with real world experiments is that, as Ms. Hinderer says, “Students are learning to think differently, not to have answers handed to them but to have to solve their own problems as they arrive. It takes more time to teach this way, but the effects are longer-lasting and the kids get better with it over time.”

 

            In this school year, 2007-2008, Michigan Project Lead the Way anticipates an increase of 30 schools across Michigan. Given this growth and the model of success that Lincoln Middle School STEM courses have had, it is expected that many more students across Michigan will soon be more rigorously involved in relevant learning.