On January 19th 2016, STEM3 Academy will open its doors to a middle school on the same campus that houses the high school. This expansion of the school to include grades 6 through 8 is in response to the early success of the high school, the intense interest from parents and the community, but also provides… Continue reading
If there is one concern more than any other which parents voice, it is: What will my child do after graduation? What college or career is appropriate? What will they be or become? This concern about the future for their son or daughter is not without merit. Even the most favorable statistics show that the… Continue reading
How do modern successful companies prepare for future workforce needs? How do they guarantee that there will be a steady pipeline of qualified candidates ready to fill the burgeoning demand for technically trained individuals? If you’re the Ford Motor Company, you start an initiative called Next Generation Learning to bring real-world problems into the classroom,… Continue reading
Last weekend, Village Glen High School participated in the Regional championship for FIRST Robotics. Competition was tight. The 41 teams that participated were some of the best in Southern California, and some of them had already participated in other Regionals, as they are allowed to do, and won awards there. The level of engineering design… Continue reading
At this weekend’s California Association for the Gifted Conference there was intense focus on the elements of depth and complexity. Students are guided towards a series of visual prompts to help them penetrate beneath the surface understanding of a concept and develop a richer understanding by thinking critically about it. Is there, for example, special… Continue reading
The path from Piaget to Papert to project-based learning is a direct one. It was the Swiss psychologist, Piaget, who argued that children don’t learn by being passive receptors of information from the environment, but by actively confronting it. His student, Papert, who went on to be a founding faculty member of the MIT Media… Continue reading
On Tuesday, the explosion of an unmanned rocket loaded with supplies for the International Space Station was a blow not only to the company that launched it, but also to the 18 students whose experiments had been chosen to be part of the payload. The experiments were designed to answer important, and in some cases… Continue reading
