Lake Fenton: Small Town, Big Success
Behind this brick facade there is a great pre-engineering school.
The Lake Fenton Middle School is situated in a small community just south of Flint, MI. It offers PLTW courses to its sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students through PLTW Master Teacher Bill Rae who, in addition to teaching middle school, updates the national PLTW course curriculum and instructs other teachers nationwide in how to teach PLTW courses.
Mr. Rae says, “My job as a middle school teacher is to get the students interested and excited and give them a better understanding of what an engineer does and can do. I want them to say, ‘Hey, I like this engineering. I want more of it!’ I teach them basic things so that when they get to high school they are primed and ready to go.”
Most of the eighth graders have already signed up to take PLTW courses next year in high school and a few plan to go into engineering at schools like Michigan Tech. Mr. Rae says, “I hear kids saying they’re going to be a mechanical engineer or they’re going into civil engineering.” When asked, even those students who are not thinking of future careers in engineering say the class is “fun” and “cool” and would recommend it to others.
Eighth grader Grace Hildensperger wants to become
a psychiatrist, but she likes her PLTW class. She says, “When
I do it right, I feel really smart.” About her projects, she says, “We have more freedom. There is a way you have to design things but you can make them your own.” Mr. Rae explains, “This is not a canned curriculum where you just follow these steps. The kids are allowed to use their creativity.” Of PLTW, Grace says, “It’s the future. We’re all about technology now so you have to know about how things work.”
In Mr. Rae’s sixth grade class, students use a complex computer program called Inventor which they mastered in only three weeks. Inventor lets them create three-dimensional computer images of an Air Slider which they build out of cardboard and test fly out in the hallway. Launched by hand or with the aid of a rubber band, the best-designed Air Sliders can travel 50-60 feet. Each launch is a lesson in what works or doesn’t. The students are constantly adjusting their Sliders to get them to travel further down the hallway than before. The students become so involved in the project that they actually sigh when the bell rings bringing class to an end.
Mr. Rae says, “One of the greatest things about PLTW is that the kids learn problem solving skills and don’t even know they are doing that. As they are building the models and doing the activities, they’re learning that process.”
Attending the PLTW class helps students meet other learning goals as well. Mr. Rae says, “The kids start seeing the reason why they need to know math. Here’s where it can be used. They can see the connection and it answers the question ‘Why do we have to learn this?’” Eighth grader Mike Kowicki says, “I pay attention a lot more in this class. I get in that mode, and in the next class, I’m able to do the same thing.”
Stryker Degayner speaks for nearly every student when he says of his PLTW class, “It’s a challenge, but a fun challenge.” Mr. Rae says of his students, “When they finish, they’ve been challenged, and there is a sense of accomplishment, and they like that sense of accomplishment.”