Category Archives: Research

Life’s Path – An Open Ended Challenge – TedX Talk – Rough Cut

Rough cut of recent TEDX talk. Edited version expected in September 2024. You’ll see places where I made a mistake speaking and went back to the start of the sentence. Those are edited out for the final version. Enjoy!

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Teaching K-6 Elementary Engineering with Robotics

International Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 37, No. 6, pp. 1–19, 2021 It only took 5 years to get this paper through the academic publishing world. It’s basically the main results of my 300 dissertation condensed down to 18 pages. It … Continue reading

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Coming Soon to a University Library Near You!

It only took 5 years to get through the academic publishing world. The main results of my 300 dissertation condensed down to 18 pages. Should be relatively readable. Very happy to get it out there. Hopefully, it will help contribute … Continue reading

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Pioneer Valley Regional School Innovation Center Update

The Innovation Center goals are:  Teach Middle School computer science and high school engineering design More generally, teach innovation, the application of math, science, the engineering design process, and presentation and documentation skills  Our focus is on hands-on, creative doing … Continue reading

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How I Used COVID Itself to Motivate My Tech Students and Why They Liked It

The Challenge I was faced, at the start of the year, with creating curriculum for a new middle school Computer Science courses centered on Computer Science Discoveries (CSD) from http://code.org/.  I also had to create new robotics engineering projects for high … Continue reading

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Middle and High School Students Enjoy Challenging and Relevant COVID Tech Projects

Middle and high school students at the Pioneer Valley Regional School  recently completed COVID related Computer Science (CS) and engineering projects.  I was faced, at the start of the year, with creating curriculum for a new middle school Computer Science courses … Continue reading

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Interviews – High School – Design Your Own COVID Social Distance Robot Project

Here’s what high school students said about their COVID social distancing robots. Analysis to come. Boy 1 I think you talked a little bit about it in the research slide but could you say how you choose a particular design … Continue reading

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Interviews – Middle School – Design Your Own COVID App Project

Here’s what middle school students said about their COVID focused apps. Analysis to come. Girl 1 – COVID Educator App How did you think of the idea for this app? Well, it was kind of first came to me because … Continue reading

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Design Your Own COVID App Student Interviews and Example Presentation

Pioneer Valley Regional School has started a new Computer Science (CS) curriculum called Computer Science Discoveries from code.org.  In the first unit, students learned the basics of computers and computer programing studying the key concepts of problem scoping, input, output, processing, … Continue reading

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Optimal Engineering Constraints In Open-ended Learning Experiences

I became interested in the determination of optimal engineering constraints in open-ended learning experiences when adapting a spaghetti bridge project, that I had previously taught online to elementary teachers,  to middle and high school engineering students. When I initially did … Continue reading

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