Triple Helix

I would like to say ‘thank you!’ to Ron Eglash and the Albany Fund for Education for their invaluable support in our project “Education is a better choice”. This is a project that I have been working on with Mrs. Carey who is a teacher at Hackett Middle School, Albany New York. Hackett is an urban school, classified as high-needs with a reduced/free lunch program eligibility of 74%.

“Education is a better choice” involves building a learning community between the students in Mrs. Carey’s classes at Hackett and the students at the Ayeduase school in Kumasi Ghana. We’ve built the project around the Kente Cloth pattern of that name, and the Hackett students have been graphing and weaving their version of the Kente Cloth as well as interacting with the Ghana students through a Google Doc.

Albany Fund for Education generously provided the funding for the looms that the students are using in the weaving project, and AFE honored Mrs. Carey and I as grant recipients this past Thursday. The Albany students are learning that the world is a bigger place than their life experiences would lead them to believe, and have benefitted from having those horizons expanded.

Ron Eglash and RPIs Triple Helix GK-12/NSF program provided the equipment, connections, and infrastructure that made the interaction between the two sets of students possible. Ron’s support and encouragement for the project has been invaluable and so very much appreciated. Thanks to Triple Helix funding, I look forward to returning to Ghana this summer to once again work with the Ayeduase students in person, and Mrs. Carey will be joining us on the trip. I know that she is very excited to meet the students at Ayeduase, who she has come to know through our project and also Enoch Bulley, their teacher.

While not quite a Holiday party, our acids and bases party was just as fun. The Science club students all brought in food items and soda for the party, and although it made a bit of a mess, it was well worth it.

The challenge remains getting the students from lunch, up to the classroom, the activity started and finished, and all leavings cleaned up in just 30 minutes. Not easy, but definitely fun.

Science club is very exciting this year. I couldn’t believe that our 8 to 10 students last year has turned into 20 this year. That’s also a challenge. The good part about Science club is that all of the students have self selected to be there – which almost guarantees better behavior and greater attention span from the students. Science club meets during the lunch period which only lasts about 30 minutes. In that amount time food needs to be eaten and an activity needs to start and finish. Given the amount of time, good behavior is absolutely crucial to accomplishing anything meaningful.

Mrs. Carey and I have been working on the Ghana connection. The CSDT community site is almost ready, and that would be an exciting means for the Hackett students and Ayeduase students to interact, with the focus being on the pCSDTs. My Kente cloth simulation is deployed and really needs students to play with it for further development ideas to be generated. The Community site will provide some much needed ‘social presence’ which so far has been missing from the CSDT and pCSDT programs.