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PRISM Workshop Gives Vigo County Science Educators New Classroom Ideas
August 5, 2011
Hallway pedestrians advanced cautiously as a trio of Vigo County
School Corporation middle school science teachers loaded another
projectile into their slingshot, a simple contraption created from
popsicle sticks and rubber bands. Pulling back on the center
of the strand of rubber bands, Lana Thralls adjusted the angle --
from side-to-side and up and down -- to determine the best
trajectory to propel a gummy bear the farthest distance down the
hallway. Providing ideas and encouragement were teammates
Dianna Cooper and Pam Nicoulin.
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Learning New Concepts: Lana Thralls prepares to release the
homemade slingshot-type device that propelled a gummy bear down a
hallway on the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology campus during a
recent workshop organized by the college's PRISM project. Assisting
in the experiment were fellow Vigo County School Corporation
science teachers Pam Nicoulin (left) and Dianna Cooper |
"Death by gummy bear!" Cooper laughed as the pedestrians come
closer, joking, "It'll just leave a small knot (on the head)."
Cooper, Nicoulin and Thralls were among 34 middle school science
educators that participated in Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology's Summer Intensive Institute, organized by the college's
Portal Resource for Indiana Science and Mathematics (PRISM)
project. The workshop is another educational asset of PRISM,
which provides free digital resources to middle school and high
school teachers of math, science, engineering and technology across
Indiana.
The two-week summer program (July 25 to August 5), funded by
grants from the Indiana Department of Education and Lilly Endowment
Inc., provided area science teachers with an opportunity for
professional development and may bring new educational concepts
into the classroom for the 2011-12 school year. The workshop
theme was "Educating for the Mind's Eye: Adapting Science Lesson
Plans to Incorporate Visual Thinking." Sessions centered on
helping students understand learning through the visualization of
relationships. Topics covered biological visualization, model
based learning, developing spatial thinking skills, math
visualization and engineering simulation.
Workshop presenters featured Rose-Hulman faculty members Michael
Robinson, Renee Rogge, Ella Ingram and Maarij Sayed, along with
IUPUI professors Pete Hylton and Wendy Otoupal-Hylton. The
workshop was organized by Patricia Carlson, PRISM's principal
investigator and project director. She noted that there was a
waiting list for teachers wishing to participate in the
program.
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Visualizing Science: Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology professor Patricia Carlson(top), director of the PRISM
project, helps Vigo County School Corporation science teachers
Joyce Striclyn, Johnna Carre and Jacob Mooney understand a concept
during this summer's educators' workshop. The theme of
the two-week program was "Educating for the Mind's Eye.
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"The Indiana standards for science have a strong emphasis on
inquiry," explains PRISM Educational Liaison Deborah Gaff, who
presented a session on teaching concepts to meet middle school and
high school weather education standards. Teachers were given
materials and encouraged to develop their own experiments "to give
them an opportunity to experience what their students would
experience in class," she said.
That's what brought Cooper, Nicoulin and Thralls to the hallway
of Rose-Hulman's Olin Advanced Learning Center. They came up
with an experiment to seeing how far they could make the gummy bear
travel horizontally, using five gummy bears, five popsicle sticks
and five rubber bands.
"The kids will like this one," Cooper says of the candy-slinging
experiment, adding, "I like this one."
Nicoulin agreed, with a smile. "This is my first year
involved with PRISM," she says, "I feel like I'm learning a
lot."
Thralls, who returned to the program for a fourth year, added:
"(PRISM) give us lots of really neat ideas to take back to the
classroom. They work really hard to give us a good
experience."