STEM Blog

Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Olney is offering a Middle School Robotics Camp for students currently in fifth through eighth grade. The camp runs the week of June 24^th through June 28^th. To learn more about the camp and to register, visit www.olgchs.org/summer2

The third grade class studied a Science unit on Rocks and Minerals.  To wrap up the unit, each third grader was assigned a mineral to research during computer class.  The children took their researched information to create and design a mineral trading card.  The colorful cards consisted of a picture, the properties, and facts relating to their mineral.   When the cards were finished sets were distributed to the class.  When the children received their pack of trading cards you would have thought it was Christmas morning.  The children were so excited not only to see their trading card, but their friends’ beautiful cards too.

The appropriate and ethical use of technology is a foundational component of instruction at St. Louis. Our efforts were recognized today during the Maryland technology-focused Common Ground Conference when St. Louis, along with one other school in the state, was invited to share our award-winning program of community cyber awareness issues and how we provide effective and sustainable Cyber Safety, Cyber Ethics and Cyber Security education in the curricula, incorporating STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), civic skills and cyber career pathways.

To learn more about the Common Ground Conference visit
www.msetonline.org/schedule.html

After sixteen weeks of work across two academic sessions, on Wednesday, April 10^th St. Louis CyberSTEM students demonstrated their accomplishments to Mrs. Weiss, Mrs. Ewachiw, moderators and parents.

During our first session the kids used a software program called Microworlds to animate virtual characters while learning about movement, direction, coordinates and how to break down a goal into individual components.  The students concluded the session by creating their own games.

During the second session the kids applied the concepts from the first session to program LEGO robots, working diligently to assemble the hardware and learning to make the robots move, make sounds, and interact with the real world.

As part of the demonstration, the students were presented with medals and certificates of completion by Dr. Davina Pruitt-Mentle, Executive Director of ETPro (Educational Technology Policy, Research and Outreach), one of the CyberSTEM program sponsors.

We would like to thank the CyberSTEM moderators for their hard work and dedication in making the program such a positive and enjoyable learning experience for our students. We received overwhelming positive feedback from students and parents and look forward to more rewarding CyberSTEM sessions next year.

Seventh Grade is beginning their cross-curricular reading of The Diary of Anne Frank.  In Language Arts, they are reading the novel in peer reading groups, enjoying their encounters with British phrases like “W.C.”, and laughing at Anne’s vivid descriptions of her companions in hiding. They learned some of the background of the Holocaust, as well as watching the original black-and-white movie.  In Computer class, the students used Google Earth to locate the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam.  Then they took an online tour of the Secret Annex where the Frank family hid, and they used Sketch-up to make a computer model of the Annex.  After that, the students, writing from the perspective of an object in the Annex, analyzed why the object was historically significant, and what the object revealed about the life of the Frank family.  In Language Arts, the students sharpened their peer editing skills and polished their classmates’ writing from Computer Class.  All of this hard work will be followed next year in Language Arts with the reading of Pulitzer Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s novel Night and a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

Google Sketch Up design by Ginika Nwaba