After a severe thunderstorm knocked out power to STARBASE HAFB in October, we had to re-schedule the final classes for Billerica’s Alpha and Bravo classes. The students finally had a chance to return to STARBASE this week. The STARBASE Team was impressed by how much they remembered about programing robots and designing with Onshape after the long break. And, did their enthusiasm wane? I don’t think so. See for yourself.
Our Special Guests for Massachusetts STEM Week 2022
For Massachusetts STEM Week 2022, we welcomed students from the the Rogers STEM Academy in Lowell. The STARBASE Team has been very impressed by these emerging bilingual students ability to take on any STEM challenges we have put before them. They are also a kind and polite class - this has not gone un-noticed.
Here they are taking on our Eggbert and Contraption Action Activities.
What's it like to complete five days at STARBASE Hanscom AFB?
It’s awesome. These students have every reason to be proud (and a little silly is allowed too). See what I mean?
STARBASE HAFB starts a brand new school year: 2022-2023
What does a new year mean at STARBASE HAFB? For the STARBASE Team it means preparation; it means readiness, it means anticipation; it means doing what we love to do. For the students, it means challenges, excitement and dreaming about their future. See what I mean?
February 2021 Getting Even More Creative with Studio Design
After several months of design, testing and extensive tweaking, our STARBASE Studio was finally ready for operation in February. The purpose of the studio is to virtually bring students into the classroom by providing multiple and unique camera views, pan-tilt-zoom actions, desktop sharing and quality sound. The result is a huge improvement over clunky and restrictive online meets. Students see us in the classroom walking around, speaking with ease, and entering into discussions, while we see the students projected on the wall of our large classroom and hear them in our headphones. The studio is a game changer for us as it allows us to serve students in the classroom, at home, or at day centers with equal access and often simultaneously. The studio allows us to proceed through the pandemic and creates new functionalities for post-pandemic operations.
Fall 2020 Getting Creative during Challenging Times
By the Fall of 2020, it was clear that we were going to have to be creative if we were going to serve students safely and effectively. Step one for us was to bring the program to the schools. Using our STARBASE van, we transported folding tables and our STEM equipment to the Captain Brown School and the William Welch School in Peabody, MA. We used each school’s gymnasium as our base camp and set up the tables in a horseshoe geometry. Our instructors were on the inside and the students were on the outside at appropriate distance.
As you can see, everyone was safe and everyone was engaged. Some activities required adaptations to operate effectively (our ‘Eggbert’ egg-drop activity had to go on wheels rather than a wire tether) but everything worked as intended. Conserving an effective and supportive pedagogy was our over-arching goal.
Even under these less than ideal conditions, students showed a tremendous desire to take on active learning problems and to express their feelings about their learning and aspirations. No doubt that students of this age, despite the best efforts of parents and teachers, feel bottled up, stressed and isolated during the pandemic. I’d like to think that our program provided an outlet and an opportunity for the students to express themselves through learning.
Although our team had been serving students since the onset of the pandemic, our first foray into in-person learning was somewhat emotional. We like to serve students as directly as possible - it’s what we do - and interacting in person after so many months was a welcome experience. Here’s a shout out to the teachers, students and administration of the Peabody Public Schools for allowing us this opportunity.
July/August 2020 - ELL Program through Collaboration
You may know that at STARBASE Hanscom AFB we run our five-day school year program in the summer for two to three weeks exclusively for English Language Learners. We do this because many ELL students are willing, able and excited to take on STEM challenges, and, in so doing, they expand their English vocabulary and pragmatic language skills. The students typically come from school districts with relative high ELL populations and which operate summer programs for their ELL students.
During the summer of 2020, many districts did not run summer ELL programs or were simply too harried by viral considerations to partner with STARBASE as usual. Instead, we were fortunate to be able to collaborate with the TAG/ALERTA program at UMass Boston. Tag/ALERTA runs a summer camp for ELL students from the Boston Public Schools, bringing them to a college campus for a taste of the college experience. In 2020, the program was more challenging to produce as it was necessarily online. The STARBASE Hanscom Team, working with the UTeach program from UMass, provided afternoon STEM program within the camp throughout July and into August.
The STARBASE Team wanted to provide a more hands-on, tactile experience than we had in the spring. We did this by creating ‘mystery boxes’ for the students and delivering them to their homes in Boston. The boxes were filled with basic, flexible-use items such as wooden dowels, foam core and various types of connectors. The materials could be used by the students to respond to engineering challenges. The students worked in teams and drafted designs before building prototypes. See one of the designs in progress and how this student built a prototype scale model elevator.
I’d like to send a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to our collaborating teams and to Raytheon for their support of the ELL program at STARBASE Hanscom AFB, each year and for 2020 in particular.
May 2020 STARBASE Hanscom and Simulations
As I mentioned in my previous post, the STARBASE Team was determined to create, or at least conserve, better practices as we moved to remote learning for the spring of 2020. We decided to start by making use of PhET Simulations. I’ve been a fan of PhET Simulations for a long time and have used them for college as well as middle and elementary classes. They allow teachers to provide an authentic setting for students to explore real phenomenon and make interpretations. They may appear to be games but, as they replicate aspects of how the world works, they are simulations.
For our approach, we emphasized pattern recognition and generalizing patterns into a rule. Using the Forces and Motion: Basics Sim, we first asked the students to observe what happens with tug of wars under different pulling scenarios. Most students were able to generalize their observations into rules that were essentially Newton’s Laws. Next, we showed students a part of the simulation that involved a robot pushing a frictionless cart with various mass objects on top. We challenged the students to find the mass of a mystery package by finding patterns in how the robot-cart acted under different circumstances.
I was truly impressed by how many students pulled this off and how much diligence they put into it. As an example, here’s a series of pictures with notes from one of the students. You can see that the student ran several scenarios with the robot-cart and wrote down the data. He noticed the patterns. He generalized, or at least extended the patterns, such that he could find the mass of the mystery package.
The STARBASE Team put a lot of thought into these early remote efforts but I can not say enough about the effort put in by the students and the dedicated support we received from the district teachers and administration. It was a great experience and a great start to a challenging year.
April 2020 STARBASE Hanscom and the start of the Viral Era
Everyone in the educational world remembers the sense of loss, the fears and the frustrations of the early days of pandemic. In the quick pivot to online learning, the STARBASE Hanscom Team felt many of the same feelings, and a daunting challenge. How do we connect with our students and teachers in a meaningful way? How do we conserve best practices when they seem inherently intertwined with in-person learning? There were no quick answers, so we jumped right in there with a commitment to improving and adapting everyday.
March 2020 The INTED2020 Education Conference and STARBASE Hanscom AFB
In early March of 2020, Wan Sin Lim of the UTeach Program at UMass Boston and I presented a paper at the INTED2020 Educational Conference in Valencia, Spain. This was a rare and welcome opportunity for us to describe our unique collaboration to an audience of educational practitioners from around the world. Our presentation focused on the experience of UTeach interns at STARBASE Hanscom AFB and how the internship program contributes to a developing Community of Practice model centered on better STEM teaching practices.