Assignment #3

As we enter the new school year with much excitement, I realized that my sense of urgency to return to work has become more of a “panicky” feeling.  Reason being, I am moving to a new classroom with a new curriculum in tow.

In meetings talking to colleagues about my “Angry Birds” project I realized that their input was very much needed, many of my colleagues had concerns about the lack of technology that I had in my classroom to present such a project, which at the time I did not take into consideration, duh!

Some of the issues that my fellow teachers had about the project were as follows:

• The lack of technology in the classroom: 
• No overhead projector, ELMO
• Spotty  and/or Poor wireless connection (our school is going through a major wireless overhaul)
• Not every student has a SMART phone, which I wouldn’t want my students to feel “left out”.
• What “real” ties did this project have to do with the community? NONE at the moment  that I could think of which left me clueless!

I could have easily borrowed an ELMO from the tech team, problem solved, but the spotty and poor wireless connection would have been something that I would have no control over. The thought of “no real ties” to the community made me realize that YES it’s a great hook, and YES everyone knows about “Angry  Birds” but not as MEANINGFUL as I would like it to be, which is the whole premise for Project Based Learning, something meaningful and relatable to meet authentic and rigorous learning needs of all students.

With that said, I’ve decided to scrap that and venture on to a new idea!

This past summer we took a camping trip as we do every year at Bellows in Waimanalo with friends and family.  Every year each family is assigned to cook a meal and that is never fun and very difficult.  One year we tried cooking on a dutch oven, it took a while to get anything decent out of it.  The year before that we used a fire, but ended up burning our dinner. We just could not get it right!  This conversation sparked an idea in our learning teams and one of our teachers had suggested to try to make a parabolic oven! Its, fast easy and not too expensive.  CLEVER!

The main ideas that were sparked in this conversation with my fellow teachers were overwhelming!  One of the Algebra 2 teachers had mentioned that when she taught parabolas she used a similar project but never had student actually build the oven and was interested in the actual construction this year.  As a learning team we have decided that our students would work in groups and have the students build their own parabolic oven using the vertex form of equation.  In doing so, students would learn the concept and by constructing the oven to see if their design would be effective by testing the oven by cooking a hotdog or something similar to such to see if their oven worked or didn’t and how they could possibly improve to make it better.


My initial steps in making this project work is to work within my learning team to come up with a lesson, to tie in with parabolas and conics.   I also was thinking about what materials would be needed and involve the community to ask for simple donations for materials that need to be used.  At first, I wanted to involve the woodshop teacher to help build it, but I think that using simple materials would keep the cost to a minimum.