immersion – Montessori Muddle

The Wall (Mural)

Our seniors wanted to leave a mark, so after their initial application to paint the outside wall of the gym was turned down, they went with a mural on the inside–in our Makerspace.

For this project, we wanted to create a mural on the basementnasium wall. First, we measured the wall and went to Home Depot to get enough paint, paint brushes, drop cloths, and tape. Then, after cleaning the wall with a damp cloth, we covered the wall with tape in a triangular pattern similar to one we found online. After that, we used pencil to mark each triangle with a letter corresponding to one of the six colors that we bought. It took us the majority of the project to paint 3-4 coats on each triangle, and on the last day we pulled it the tape and touched up any mistakes with white paint.

Throughout this project, we found out that some people know how to paint, some people learned, and others didn’t learn. BUT IT WAS SO MUCH FUN!

-Team: Elliott, Abby, John, Zoe, Mary, Annemarie, and Josiah

-Abby R.

Longboard

For my makerspace project I made a longboard. What went well with the board was the wheels and trucks, it was a simple hole in the wood and screwing the trucks almost no measuring on my part. What didn’t go so well was the measuring and cutting of the board, it took me a full day to get all the measurements exact and even then they didn’t come out so good. What I would do next time is get a cnc machine so it does the measuring and gets the cuts exact every time. We could mass produce longboards with ease. If i did it again without a cnc machine i would get the measurements beforehand and then it would make measuring a lot easier.

– Isaac L.

Inspired by a video of a temporary bridge built out in the woods for mountain biking, my students wanted to try building a “natural” bridge with no fasteners–no screws, no nails–over a small ravine that feeds into our creek.

We found a couple large fallen logs to cut into two 10 foot lengths for the basic structural support for the bridge. These were dug into the ground to anchor them on either side of the ravine. We then chopped a couple more logs into 2 foot sections to go across the structural logs. The dense mud from the banks of the creek was then packed onto the top to hold it all together.

In the end, the bridge turned out to be pretty solid, and definitely usable.

Model Skate Park

After batting around a number of ideas, three of my middle schoolers settled on building a model skate park out of popsicle sticks and cardboard for their interim project.

A lot of hot glue was involved.

The ramps turned out to be pretty easy, but on the second day they decided that the wanted a bowl, which proved to be much more challenging. They cut out sixteen profiles out of thicker cardboard, made a skeleton out of popsicle sticks, and then coated the top with thin, cereal-box cardboard.

When they were done they painted the whole thing grey–to simulate concrete I think–except for the sides, which were a nice flat blue so that they could put their own miniature graffiti over the top.

It was a lot of careful, well thought-out work.

Elephant Rocks

We stopped at the Elephant Rocks State Park our way down to Eminence MO for our middle school immersion trip. The rocks are the remnants of a granitic pluton (a big blob of molten rock) that cooled underground about 1.5 billion years ago. As the strata above the cooled rock were eroded away the pressure release created vertical and horizontal cracks (joints). Water seeped into those joints, weathered the minerals (dissolution and hydrolysis mainly), and eroded the sediments produced, to create the rounded shapes the students had a hard time leaving behind.

This was a great stop, that I think we’ll need to keep on the agenda for the next the next trip. I did consider stopping at the Johnson’s Shut-Ins Park as well, but we were late enough getting to Eminence as it was. Perhaps next time.

Plate Tectonics on the Eminence Immersion

The picture of a convergent tectonic boundary pulls together our immersion trip to Eminence, and the geology we’ve been studying this quarter. We saw granite boulders at Elephant Rocks; climbed on a rhyolite outcrop near the Current River; spelunked through limestone/dolomitic caverns; and looked at sandstone and shale outcrops on the road to and from school.

An oceanic-oceanic subduction zone. The subducting plate melts producing volatile magma. — The subducting plate melts producing volatile magma.

DNA Visualization

Screen capture from R.M's code. — Screen capture from R.M’s code.

Another interesting project that came out of the Creativity Interim was a VPython program that uses the DNA Writer translation table to convert text into a DNA sequence that is represented as a series of colored spheres in a helix.

The code, by R.M. with some help from myself, is below. It’s pretty rough but works.

dna_translator.py

from visual import *
import string

xaxis = curve(pos=[(0,0),(10,0)])

inp = raw_input("enter text: ")
inp = inp.upper()


t_table={}



t_table['0']="ATA"
t_table['1']="TCT"
t_table['2']="GCG"
t_table['3']="GTG"
t_table['4']="AGA"
t_table['5']="CGC"
t_table['6']="ATT"
t_table['7']="ACC"
t_table['8']="AGG"
t_table['9']="CAA"
t_table['start']="TTG"
t_table['stop']="TAA"
t_table['A']="ACT"
t_table['B']="CAT"
t_table['C']="TCA"
t_table['D']="TAC"
t_table['E']="CTA"
t_table['F']="GCT"
t_table['G']="GTC"
t_table['H']="CGT"
t_table['I']="CTG"
t_table['J']="TGC"
t_table['K']="TCG"
t_table['L']="ATC"
t_table['M']="ACA"
t_table['N']="CTC"
t_table['O']="TGT"
t_table['P']="GAG"
t_table['Q']="TAT"
t_table['R']="CAC"
t_table['S']="TGA"
t_table['T']="TAG"
t_table['U']="GAT"
t_table['V']="GTA"
t_table['W']="ATG"
t_table['X']="AGT"
t_table['Y']="GAC"
t_table['Z']="GCA"
t_table[' ']="AGC"
t_table['.']="ACG"

dna=""

for i in inp:
    
    dna=dna+t_table[i]
print dna

m=0
r=3.0
f=0.5
n=0.0
dn=1.5


start_pos = 1
for i in dna:
    rate(10)
    n+=dn
    m+=1
    x = n
    y=r*sin(f*n)
    z=r*cos(f*n)
    a=sphere(pos=(x,y,z))
    #print x, y, z
    if (i == "A"):
        a.color=color.blue
    elif (i== "G"):
        a.color=color.red
    elif (i== "C"):
        a.color=color.green

Dendrochronology with Bradford Pears

A slice out of the trunk of a Bradford Pear tree.

With the help of Scott Woodbury from the Shaw Nature Reserve, Dr. Sansone lead the effort to remove the six mature Bradford Pear trees from the front of the school over the last interim. We collected slices of each of the trees so students could do a little dendrological work with the tree rings.

The trees were planted as part of the original landscaping of the school campus. They’re pretty in the spring and fall, but are an aggressive invasive species.

The fast growth, however, make for wide growth rings. In fact, in addition to the annual rings, there are several millimeter wide sub rings that are probably related to specific weather events within the year. I’d like to see if we can co-relate some of the sub-ring data to the longer term instrumental record of the area.

The tree cutting was quite fun as well, despite being done on a cold day near the end of November. Students helped stack logs and organize branches along the road for the woodchipper. I learned how to use a chainsaw.

Six Bradford Pear tree slices, cut on November 25th, 2013.

Category: immersion