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It Is Time!

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

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

STEM in the real world

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

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

Education’s Modern Face

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

The face of education is changing rapidly to meet the demands of modern enterprise and industry. Just over the last few years alone, there have been new CCSS (Common Core State Standards), Next Gen (Next Generation Science Standards), and we have seen the rise of STEM and STEAM and their variants, some focusing on art,… Continue reading

STEM and SPED

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

It is now regarded as a truism that many of those with an ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) who are at the upper end of the spectrum have specific talents and abilities that lend themselves particularly well to STEM pursuits. It is equally true that those with an ASD thrive when provided with supports that mitigate… Continue reading

STEM across disciplines

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

Humankind is beset with problems of its own making: runoff of chemicals from industrial agriculture risks polluting the water table; human overpopulation taxes the environment to produce sufficient food, to supply enough potable water, and results in massive production of waste; and the energy industries (coal, oil and nuclear) have had a significant environmental impact… Continue reading

The path to success

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

“Houston, we’ve had a problem here”. So rang out those chilling words on April 13th, 1970, when the world first learned that the Apollo 13 manned mission to the moon was in jeopardy. An oxygen tank had exploded, resulting in a loss of oxygen, battery power, and water, all this with the spacecraft and crew… Continue reading

Learning and experience

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

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

Work and self-worth

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

Increasingly, we are what we do and say, what we make and communicate. We know Einstein by his physical theories, Walt Whitman by his poetry, Dali by his art just as Mark Zuckerberg is synonymous with FaceBook, Jeff Bezos with Amazon, and Steve Jobs with Apple. On average, we work a third of our lives,… Continue reading

Foundational Skills and STEM

Published on: Author: Ellis Crasnow Leave a comment

In the 19th century, the foundation of a good education was grounded in reading, writing and arithmetic. In the 20th, the mandate was to provide a sound liberal-arts education. Though we only have early returns to go on, the voting for the 21st century seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of a STEM education. This… Continue reading