Harless CREATE Satellite Has Year-End Celebration

 

 The June Harless Center for Rural Educational Research and Development, College of Education at Marshall University, held a year-end celebration showcasing Harless CREATE Satellite projects on May 17, 2012 from 6-8 in the Memorial Student Center’s Don Morris Room.  

Featured projects included: the GigaPan Outreach Project, Arts and Bots, Hear Me, and Message From Me. In addition, a new WaterBot project was introduced.  GigaPan enablesstudents to take GigaPan panoramic images of their communities and activities and share them with peers across the world. Arts and Bots is a customized robot designed to integrate technology, literature, and history through the use of art supplies, circuit boards, lights, motors and sensors. Hear Me seeks to amplify kids voices using media and technology to create a world where kids are heard, acknowledged and understood, thereby giving them the power to inspire change in their lives, communities and the world. WaterBot is a citizen scientist project that prototypes a low-cost, easy and mobile method to monitor water quality, empowering communities, educators and children to monitor their watershed systems.

 

 

The Harless CREATE Satellite grant, which was funded by the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, provides rural Appalachian schools continuous and seamless access to technologies, educational resources and ideas generated at the CREATE Lab in Pittsburgh. In addition it enabled teachers to integrate cutting edge technology into existing curriculum.   

Schools showcasing projects are from the Marshall University Professional Development Partnership Schools and include the Early Education STEM Center, Huntington High, Kellogg, Guyandotte and Ceredo Elementary schools, Beverly Hills, Milton, Barboursville Middle schools, as well as Cherry River Elementary in Nicholas county, Beverly Elementary in Randolph county and South Point High School in Ohio.

 

 

Pre-Engineering At Huntington High School, WV

Students in the Pre-Engineering class at Huntington High School show off their robots.

Shark

"My shark is hooked up to a light and motion sensor. There is a fish in his mouth that has a LED light for an eye, and vibrates. It is sequenced so that if you get too close, the fish vibrates and when the lights go out his eyes light up."

Helicopter

"I am going to explain a little bit about my robot. Well first of all it is a battering ram helicopter. What it does is that if you want to take a building from the top to the bottom you use this because it comes down like a hammer. But you have to be a pretty good pilot because one mistake can cause you to crash. This shows you how crazy my imagination is. Here is a video to show you exactly what it does."

Rain

"My project is about a rainy day where there is a cloud that turns over and rains. There is a servo motor on the top loft and it has balsa wood where the rain sits on. When it turns over it rains little blue packing peanuts to the ground."

Wizard

"I was inspired to create this scene while working in the orchestra for our school's production of Beauty and the Beast. While playing the music, I realized that the main themes of the music were small and oft repeated. I wanted to incorporate this aspect into a small scene. Originally the wizard was going to tell the story, but ironically, Beauty and the Beast caused time to run short. His lines would have been things such as "Darkness fell on the forest" and "Stay away!!" and "I told you to stay away!" I am quite pleased with this project."

Car

"The robot is car like design with features that are similar to ones you would find on a car. The headlights brighten when the lights go out and the brake lights brighten when the robot stops. The robot will stop and back up when an object is placed in front of it before resuming its forward motion. The movement of the robot is powered by a motor that is attached to a sprocket that turns a chain which is connected to sprockets fixed on the robots two axles thus turning the wheels."

Dragon

"This robot is a design of a dragon. I choose this design because I figured it would be cool and not a lot of people would chose this design. It uses a motion sensor which is located on its left arm, 2 tri colored LEDs for eyes, 3 servos to move its wings and its tail. The whole body of the dragon is made out of popsicle sticks and has fake fire coming out of its mouth. The wings is a type of green frabic and it is pieced togethered with glue and tape. The robot does a lot of stuff like move its wings and tail, makes sounds, and changes it's eye color."

R2D2

"I decided to make my robot a model of R2D2. I went to my basement to salvage some trash and old junk which we no longer needed and as a result, the base of my robot is made of a flashlight and foam. The head is entirely foam, and all of the body is wrapped in super glue. I bought cardboard boxes for $0.44 each and constructed multiple legs and other useful parts. parts of its eyes are also the top of a pen cap and all of the blue shiny paper is origami paper from my drawers. All in all, it was a fun project, but there were some difficult parts which had to be overcome. One of which is putting the hummingbird inside caused wiring extremely difficult and next to impossible to see where what was going. Thats where tweezers come it! The next difficult issue, probably the hardest, was overcoming torque with R2D2's wheels. the motor does not have any sort of attachment process, so only glue could have been used. This caused the twisting to come off multiple times until I found the perfect ratio of hot glue and super glue. Finally, the last difficult issue was the fact that the arts and bots program was unable to load my MC Hammer "cant touch this" song. I had to troubleshoot it and work it through itunes instead. My original plan wanted it to pace back and forth, checking every second for an object, and when something would obstruct its view, it would dance. I instead had to put this at a predictable time since I, manually, had to click itunes. overall all, it was a fun and interesting project and I recommend it for any highschool kid."

School link: http://www.edline.net/pages/Huntington_High_School

MU Early Education STEM Center Goes From Nap Time to Tech Time!

March 30, 2012 @ 12:00 AM

LACIE PIERSON

The Herald-Dispatch

HUNTINGTON -- Most daycares have snack time, nap time and all sorts of games, but the Marshall University Early Education STEM Center has all of that, along with robots and voice activated technology that its Pre-K students are not only playing with but are helping build almost on their own.

That technology and those students were on full display during a family night event Thursday at the STEM Center in Corbly Hall on Marshall University's Campus.

Specifically, students were eager to engage in activities that made their way to Marshall's campus thanks to a partnership with the Create Lab at Carnegie Mellon, which includes three main projects called GigaPan, Hear ME and Message from Me, said Tarabeth Brumfield, the director of the Early Education STEM Center.

"All of these activities have so many ways to engage these kids in using technology," Brumfield said. "These are kids who have had technology be a part of their lives from the start, and they aren't scared or intimidated by any of it."

Brumfield was especially excited for the Message from Me Center, which allows the students to wirelessly upload photos by themselves, create a message to go with it and send the photo and message via text or email to someone from a list of people including their STEM teachers, their classmates and their parents.

The Message for Me machine is one of thirty in existence, Brumfield said.

"It's a neat way for them to engage their school life into their home life," she said. "It's a fun way to share what they're doing with their parents while they're learning."

Parker Adkins, a 4-year-old STEM student, operated the Message for Me machine like a pro, and his parents, Nisa and Shawn Adkins, said they've seen so many changes since their son began attending daycare at the STEM center.

"We wanted to send him to a place where we knew he wouldn't fall through the cracks, where he could get one-on-one attention, and he's gotten that here," Nisa Adkins said. "He's opened up so much, and there's so much difference in the way he deals with problems and works through things. The whole thing is just great."

For more information, visit www.marshall.edu/stemc.

 

http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/x439595474/MU-Pre-K-program-goes-from-nap...

 

Arts and Bots-Robotics in Pre-K!

The Marshall University Early Education STEM Center is one of the Professional Development Schools piloting the Arts and Bots project.  The project, originally started for middle school girls, has expanded to include both genders as well as other ages.  This is the first time the project has been used in elementary grades as well as pre-k. Many thanks to graduate assistant Lee-Dorah Wokpara for taking on this task and being creative and flexible with the curriculum. Children were encouraged to make a plan and draw a design before creating their robot.  We can't wait to see what the children come up with! 

Harless CREATE Satellite Holds Arts and Bots Training

Teachers from Huntington High School, Ceredo Elementary, South Point High School and the MU Early Education STEM Center took part in a 2-day training on arts and bots on February 17th and 18th on Marshall's campus.  The 8 teachers agreed to pilot the project and integrate it into existing classroom curriculum and will be using it in a variety of subjects including engineering, physics, chemistry, science and math.  Jenn Cross from CMU's CREATE Lab was on hand to help train the teachers on equipment use while the Harless CREATE Satellite team assisted with curriculum. The project will expand to include additional schools and teachers in the fall and a summer training is planned.   We look forward to seeing what the teachers and students come up with!

Year Two of the GigaPan Outreach Project Kicks Off!


The June Harless CREATE Satellite held a two-day training on September 30th and October 1st at Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia.  Around 40 teachers from Cabell, Wayne, Nicholas and Randolph counties from year one and two of the grant learned about GigaPan technology and how to integrate it into existing curriculum. Advanced integration strategies for every day use in reading, writing, vocabulary, social studies and science were examined as well.  Teachers left with projects planned and ideas ready to incorporate into their classroom.  We're excited about beginning a new year with GigaPan and looking forward to working with a great group of teachers!    

Huntington High School Uses GigaPan to Capture West Virginia State History

Teachers at Huntington High School are combining GigaPan technology with West Virginia history to engage students and help them understand the unique culture that surrounds them.  

Coal and coal mining in West Virginia has had perhaps the biggest impact on shaping the history and now the future of our state. Coal is found in 53 of its 55 counties with 43 of them having minable reserves. Even though coal has played such an important role in developing WV and the future of our state depends on its use as an alternative fuel, few WV students know much about it. School teachers from Cabell County are embarking on a unique project this summer to develop the skills necessary to bring place-based curricula dealing with WV coal to their own classes. These teachers traveled throughout West Virginia utilizing GPS, scientific probeware, blogs, still/video cameras, and a host of software to develop a "virtual Tour" to many of the mining sites, both past and present, that have helped shape our WV history. Cabell county teachers learned about deep coal mining, surface mining, stream run-off, and the history of coal mining in general during their trip. 

 

Below is a video created by Josh Ratliff showing how GigaPan was used to document historical sites in West Virginia history.  

 


Marshall University 2011 Freshman Class Captured Via GigaPan!

Marshall University's June Harless Center trained a group from University College to capture GigaPan images for the freshman convocation that took place on August 18th.  Numbers on Convocation are not final however, turnout was estimated comparable to last year with 1800-1850 freshman students attending Convocation.( Please note, this is not the entire freshman class.)  

In addition,  Dr. Harold Blanco of the College of Education introduced new Marshall faculty to GigaPan technology and how to integrate it into their curriculum.  Departments included theatre, social work, math, education and pharmacy to name a few.  

 

http://gigapan.org/gigapans/0fbad529486d429daddc3cf761663003/