STEM Comes to Life Through Integrated Learning

Written by Ms. Rebekah Davis, M.S.

Spring is officially here and STEM teachers are taking it to the next level with experiments that get students up, active, outside and shooting things off into the sky! 

Every good STEM teacher strives to help their students understand the application of their discipline -- to witness how scientific and mathematical principles don’t exist in a vacuum, but when integrated and applied to the real world, they unlock the potential to create! Teaching STEM in an engaging way is no easy thing. We are so proud of our Jr. High and High School teachers who work hard to make integrated learning happen.
Last week at the High School level, Ms. Castro (Math) and Ms. Hartnell (Physics) collaborated on a rocket ship project which had the students creating and launching bottle rockets across the field. In planning their rockets, each student had to consider drag, lift, thrust, center of gravity and center of pressure when designing a flying craft. They also learned how to calculate velocity and acceleration to build their quadratic equations.

LEFT: Ms. Hartnell guides students through the process of building rockets. Students had to consider drag, lift, thrust, center of gravity and center of pressure when designing a flying craft.

MIDDLE: High School Math teacher Ms. Castro looks for every opportunity to engage young bodies along with their minds. Coming back from Spring Break, she put chalk in the hands of Pre-Algebra students and turned them loose to review linear equations on the basketball courts. Students loved it!

RIGHT: After launching their rockets, students used the time and distance from their flight paths to build quadratic equations which mapped the trajectory in a parabola.

Meanwhile inside with the Jr. High students, Mr. Aaseby was making magic happen with a chemical experiment involving “elephant toothpaste”. Students analyzed the chemical reaction and pinpointed variables of the reaction, then changed those in order to produce a new hypothesis with a new result. 8th grader Blessing Davis says, “I learned how important it is to be really specific in predicting outcomes when the variables change.” 

Jr. High Science teacher Skylar Aaseby is known for ensuring his students truly understand even the most challenging topics. He was inspired to build this wave pool to demonstrate to his students how transverse waves are additive and subtractive when they interact together.

Not only were students applying the scientific method, the experiment also gave significance to the concept of exothermic reactions as the beakers were warm from the produced heat. One student who is reluctant when it comes to science shared, “Mr. Aaseby works so hard to make a difficult thing like science make total sense! I don’t really like science, but I’ve actually really enjoyed his class because he makes it easy for me to understand. He is most definitely a top example of what a teacher should look like.” 

Bravo teachers, here at The Academy and all over our nation this year, who work so hard to provide an engaging learning experience for the students. We appreciate you!