Hannah's Future City Team

I'm proud of Hannah and her teammates. They have been working for months, in preparation for the "Future City" competition. Great scientific thinking. Great research, reading, and writing. They had some of the most innovative and practical solutions for dealing with storm water runoff and energy generation in their invented city.

We appreciate their science teacher, Mrs Ferro, who spent all of our 3 day weekend with the 8th grade "Science Ninjas" last weekend and also spent their "snow day" with the kids, building and revising their project.

The team did an excellent job communicating both verbally and by using visuals such as their model, pictures and diagrams. They made the judges' (engineers) eyes light up.

Postscript:
Their team did not make the final 5 teams at the competition, which surprised us and was a little disappointing.  However, they did win the "Best New Team" award and the "Most Sustainable Energy" award.  We found out yesterday that they also had the highest scores in the whole competition for their presentation.  The presentation was one of 4 parts (Sim City Model, Essay, Model w/ Moving Parts, Presentation).  Her teacher surprised the girls yesterday morning at an assembly with an award and $500 scholarship each form College of Idaho for representing their team so well in the presentation phase.

Apps For Learning On My iPad

These are some of the learning apps on my iPad. My kids and I are great guinea pigs. Almost everything is free. Quite a geeky (but fun) house.

A few highlights:

• Opposites: A vocabulary game in which you try to match opposite words as fast as you can, before it is too late.  Appropriately challenging for fluent readers.  The more advanced levels are even challenging for me.
• Dust Buster: This is a keyboard (piano) practice game.  A fun challenge.  It seems to be addicting.  It keeps adding new popular songs to the repertoire.  They can be purchased with points earned through practice.
• Cargo Bot: Basic programming and logic.
• RoboLogicLE: Program your robot to do simple tasks.  This kind of thinking (planning and sequencing) is essential to future success in many areas.  No coding required.  All programming is visual.  
• Hungry Fish: Early math (addition)
• NOVA Elements: Can you say geeky?  The periodic table comes to life.  They'll go to chemistry someday with a head full  of introductory knowledge already.  It is interactive.
• Numerosity and Scootpad: I'm just dabbling with these two more-structured learning apps.