Staying in the Field

A recent article by Sean Cavangh from Education Week talks about how more students who are in the STEM field end up leaving the field. They “don’t last in graduate studies and the workforce” and this is not due to a lack of talent either. The assumption made by officials and policymakers is the schools in the States are not grooming enough students with sufficient talent to make it in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math); however, the new study shows that top-tier high school students choosing STEM dropped from 29% to 14% between the 1990s and 2000-2005.

Are STEM jobs no longer attractive to students for some reason? Or is it because non-STEM jobs such as business and law and health care are more stable, higher paying, and more prestigious? What are your thoughts?

ING Unsung Heroes

 

ING Unsung Heroes Program offers Grants for K-12 Educational Projects.  Every year, educators submit applications for an ING Unsung Heroes grant by describing projects they would like to pursue. Each project is evaluated on its innovative method, creativity, and ability to positively influence students.

One hundred finalists will be selected to receive a grant of $2,000 each, payable to both the winning teacher and his or her school. The deadline for this year is April 30, 2010. Please see below for more information.

More details

How to apply

Environmental Education Grants

Environmental education increases public awareness and knowledge about environmental issues or problems. In doing so, it provides the public with the necessary skills to make informed decisions and take responsible action.

The Grants Program sponsored by EPA’s Environmental Education Division (EED), Office of Children’s Health Protection and Environmental Education, supports environmental education projects that enhance the public’s awareness, knowledge, and skills to help people make informed decisions that affect environmental quality. EPA awards grants each year based on funding appropriated by Congress. Annual funding for the program ranges between $2 and $3 million. Most grants will be in the $15,000 to $25,000 range.

Brockport Central School District was awarded with $4,849 in 1999. Many schools were awarded in the past few years.

Details of EE Grants Awarded in New York

The deadline for applying for a 2010 environmental education grant is December 15, 2009.

How to apply

 

3rd Annual Rochester Educator Collaboration Event

After months and weeks of preparation, the 3rd Annual Rochester Educator Collaboration Event finally arrived! On October 6th, 2009 more than 120 educators from the Rochester area bright eyed and bushy tailed at the Rochester Science Museum to begin a day of workshops and discussions to help improve math and science learning from grades kindergarten up through college.

The day started out with breakfast and keynote speaker speech by Dr. Jim Stigler. Then, the educators broke off into 3 different tracks (A, B, and C) to start their workshops. Track A was on lesson study, Track B on culture of collaboration, and Track C on professional learning communities. There were also plenty of vendors at the this event that featured everything from textbooks, to graduate school programs, to laboratory equipment and materials. My favorite is still the skull with the removable top and mobile jaw.

The recognition luncheon not only offered great food, but it also announced the winner of the Excellence in STEM Teaching Award. Finally, the networking at the end of the day offered everyone to reflect on what they had learned in their tracks that day. We look forward to hosting this even again next year and hope to see you all again!

Congratulations STEM Award Finalists!

 

  David Ebersole                  Cary Burke                         Bob Dedrick

The Excellence in STEM Teaching Award recognizes those teachers who have used innovative and creative ways to engage their students in Math, Science, and Technology. Travel scholarships of $2000 each will be awarded to 5 finalists and a $10,000 classroom makeover prize will be given to one grand prize winner. On October 6th, there will be a Recognition Luncheon for them at the Rochester Museum & Science Center.

Congratulations David Ebersole!

Congratulations to David Ebersole, one of the finalists of the 2009 Excellence in STEM Teaching Award! He teaches Science at Athena Middle School in Greece and has been a teacher for 19 years. Using creative interactions with his students, David turns science into a classroom activity and a group learning experience. On October 6th, 2009, there will be a recognition luncheon for David Ebersole and the two other finalists at our Third Annual Rochester Educator Collaboration Event.

The STEM Award honors David’s activity of teaching student how two systems (respiratory and circulatory) worked together in order to help them understand the ILSPET exam.

The activity is set up in a large room (either a gym or classroom), using colored tape, diagrams, and objects to represent arteries, veins, lungs, heart as well as oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules. Students need to walk the path of a red blood cell as it travels through the lungs to pick up oxygen and drop of carbon dioxide, to the heart, through arteries, then veins, and back. This activity can be made as simple or as complex as needed based on the grade level.

At the end of Mr Ebersole’s activities, his students were not only able to show a better understanding of body systems, they also had fun and enjoyed class. Because this activity can be used at a variety of grade levels, it’s an extremely useful tool for any teacher looking for creative ways to help their students understand a topic.

Once again we would like to congratulate David Ebersole for winning the first round of the Excellence in STEM Teaching Award!

Congratulations to Suzanne Pilon!

The Rochester Area Colleges’ Center for Excellence in Math and Science (RAC-CEMS) wants to congratulate Suzanne Monagan Pilon for receiving the  Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Mrs. Pilon is a Primary Multi-Age Teacher at Hilton’s Quest Elementary School. The news article can be found at Hilton Central School District’s website.

To find out more about this and other awards for educators, visit our web site’s Educator Fellowships and Awards page.

Using an Abundant Aquatic Resource to Fuel Science Education

The RAC-CEMS is proud to present a fantastic opportunity for Science teachers to learn about a new way to use Zebra Mussels in an exciting, discovery based lesson for high school students.  This is an excellent opportunity to enhance your Living Environments, Environmental Science or Chemistry course.

Zebra Mussels covering a fat mucket (Lampsilis siliquoidea) – Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

Although zebra mussels have caused numerous problems in our water ways, these organisms actually can be an excellent tool to teach a variety of science and mathematics skills.  High school science teachers will learn how to easily collect, maintain and use these abundant aquatic organisms in a variety of hands-on scientific experiments and quantitative modeling exercises.  The activities are designed to promote inquiry-based learning, teach and strengthen students’ scientific research and mathematical analysis skills, and demonstrate to the students their relationship with their environment.  Activities will include the collection of mussels, the design and completion of hypothesis-driven quantitative experiments, and the integration of the field and experimental data into mathematical models detailing the effects of Zebra Mussels on the ecosystem.

The event will be hosted at Keuka College from July 27-31st  of 2009.  Seating is limited so sign up today!

Click on and remember to select Using Zebra Mussels for Good, Not Evil: Hands-on Experiments and Modeling Activities

Race Car Made From Vegetables And Runs On Chocolate

Last week, Warwick University in England unveiled its 95% biodegradable race car that runs on chocolate. It has been made entirely of sustainable and renewable materials including vegetables!

The idea of using chocolate as biodiesel is not new as the team that drove across Europe and West Africa on 2007 demonstrated (Journey across Europe to Timbuktu, Chocolate Powered Truck). But the University of Warwick took it many steps further. “While the main focus of car manufacturers has been decreasing engine emissions, the University of Warwick team broadened their vision to include the raw materials used to build the car, as well considering its final disposal” (Chocolate Powered Car). “The project clearly demonstrates that automotive environmentalism can and should be about the whole package” (Chocolate Powered Racing Car…).

Materials:

steering wheel	carrots
seat	flax fiber shell, soy bean and recycled polyester
mirrors	potato starch
brake pads	ground cashew nut shells
body	potato starch, recycled carbon fiber, recycled plastic bottles
lubricants	plant oils
biodiesel	cocoa butter (a waste product from making chocolate) turned into bio-ethanol and mixed with vegetable oil to make biodiesel

The car is expected to go 145 mph and 125 mph around corners. It took more than nine months to develop it and the cost was around USD$227,000.

Project Director, James Meredith, said “The WorldFirst project expels the myth that performance needs to be compromised when developing the sustainable motor vehicles of the future” (Chocolate Powered Racing Car…). He also mentioned that the team plans to use similar techniques to build other vehicles, such as road cars and boats (TG Daily).

Will there be enough chocolate waste to power these vehicles?

It seems that the world will need many sources to produce the biodiesel that vehicles being developed will need. This is all very exiting and I can’t wait to see it all unfold.

For more information, watch the video:

Famous Women in Mathematics

There is a very special relationship between one of my math professors this semester and a student in the class. The professor has said several times during the semester: “I need to find out about some female mathematicians”, usually after comments like: “…and that math book was written by a man, right?”  They have inspired me to do a little bit of research about famous women in mathematics to arm my professor with much needed information to respond to the student before this semester is over!

Hopefully this information will be useful to others to encourage young girls to pursue a career in mathematics or related fields.

I found three websites with lists of famous women mathematicians. Some of the links in the websites link you to biographical databases in other websites.  The three websites are: Biographies of Women in Mathematics, Famous Mathematicians from Underrepresented Groups, and Female Mathematicians. I checked all the mathematicians that were in more than one of the three lists and here are the ones I picked:

Name	Achievement
Theano c.16 Century B.C	Wife of Pythagoras. Ran School of Pythagoras after his death. Wrote works on the Golden Ratio.
Hypatia 370?-415	Made idea of conics easier to understand.
Florence Nightingale May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910	Called: Prophetess of Applied Statistics Invented Polar Area Chart in the form of polar wedges to dramatize the needless deaths caused by unsanitary conditions and the need for reform.
Winifred Edgerton Merrill September 24, 1862 – September 6, 1951	First American woman to receive a PhD in math. Worked on the geometrical interpretation of multiple integrals and figure out the computation of the orbit of a comet.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi May 16, 1718 – January 9, 1799	“By far the most important and extraordinary figure in mathematics during the 18th century.” Most important work: Analytical Institutions gave a clear summary of the state of knowledge in mathematical analysis. It included: analysis of finite quantities; elementary problems of maxima, minima, tangents, and inflection points; analysis of infinitely small quantities; integral calculus; and the inverse method of tangents and differential equations.
Grace Chisholm Young March 15, 1868 – March 29, 1944	Worked with her husband on set theory. Authored 13 publications with her husband and 18 by herself. Bruckner and Thomson wrote that “The whole field of what was then called ‘the theory of functions of a real variable’ was reworked and rewritten in those first decades [of the 20th century]. The Youngs played a major role in that effort.”
Edith Clarke February 10, 1883 – October 29, 1959	Achievements in applications of mathematics to engineering. She became an authority on the manipulation of hyperbolic functions, equivalent circuits, and graphical analysis.
Irmgard Flugge-Lotz July 16, 1903 – May 22, 1974	Professor Flugge-Lotz acted in a central role in the development of the aircraft industry in the Western world. Her contributions spanned a lifetime during which she demonstrated, in a field dominated by men, the value and quality of a woman’s intuitive approach in searching for and discovering solutions to complex engineering problems.
Ellen Amanda Hayes September 23, 1851 – October 27, 1930	Hayes wrote several textbooks on Lessons on Higher Algebra (1891, revised 1894), Elementary Trigonometry (1896), and Calculus with Applications, An Introduction to the Mathematical Treatment of Science (1900).
Edna Kramer Lassar May 11, 1902 – July 9, 1984	Kramer’s greatest work is considered the book, The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, which was published in 1970. This work took her 14 years to complete. In 1972 she was elected into the Hall of Fame at Hunter College. Her many books still are read and studied today, including A First Course in Educational Statistics, Mathematics Takes Wings: An Aviation Supplement to Secondary Mathematics, and The Main Stream of Mathematics.
Rózsa Péter February 17, 1905 – February 16, 1977	Péter was the author of Playing with Infinity: Mathematical Explorations and Excursions, translated into at least 14 languages, and Recursive Functions in Computer Theory. The latter was the second Hungarian mathematical book to be published in the Soviet Union because its subject matter was considered indispensable to the theory of computers.
Helena Rasiowa June 20, 1917 – August 9, 1994	Helena Rasiowa greatly contributed to the development of research in Poland on applications of logical methods in the foundations of computer science. She was one of the first to realize the great importance of mathematical logic for computer science – and at the same time she clearly saw the significance of computer science for the development of logic itself.
Argelia Velez-Rodriguez 1936-	Cuban Black Woman: First Black woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Habana. She taught in several American schools before joining the mathematics faculty at Bishop College in Dallas, Texas, where she was chairperson of the Department of Mathematical Science from 1975 to 1978. In 1979 she became a program manager with the Minority Institutions Science Improvement Program in Washington, D.C. Since 1980 she has been a program director for the Department of Education.

As the author of Famous Mathematicians from Underrepresented Groups said: “… until recently, women were mostly prevented from doing mathematics, so relatively few women have become famous in mathematics.” Therefore, now that women are able to study mathematics, we must inspire, encourage and help girls become interested in mathematics at an early age and help them pursue careers in math or related fields.