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| It isn't called the Navy Yard for nothing! |
Yesterday, I had a chance to head down to the Philadelphia Navy Yard and sit down with the students of The Sustainability Workshop to talk about what makes a successful research project. I was asked to tell them about a "cool" project that I managed and what it took to make it a success. Hmmmm, what to choose? How about something that involved multiple people, complicated logistics, difficult experimental challenges, and maybe even "fun." Oh, wait, I got it, that thing with NASA, you know, K-12 teachers working intensely for months on a common goal that ended with us floating through the air!
So I showed the students our
5 minute video (thanks Aliya!) and let the questions fly. "How does that work?" "What happens to gravity?" "How can I do that?" "Cool!"
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| If high school students can build this car as part of an after school club, imagine what they can do if they have a school devoted to real-world projects. |
What was immediately clear to me was that this was an amazing group of students, enthusiastic, engaged with the topic, ready to get to work, and fun. (there's that pesky word again) So we talked about how the airplane simulates microgravity ("Imagine a football thrown from Michael Vick to DeShawn Jackson for a touchdown and the path the football takes. Now imagine you are inside that football and you are holding a pen and you let that pen go. As you both travel inside that football and the football is in free fall, it appears that the pen is floating. Get it?"). And we talked about some of the experiments such as water splashing in microgravity (One of the students compared it to blood splashing in a CSI-Miami episode. It made sense at the time!) or a pendulum stopping as gravity went to zero ("you have to see it to believe it!").
Then our conversation headed towards the fact that a regular school, a normal school, does not accept failure. Grades, GPA, SAT scores, quizes, tests, and so on are how students are measured and there is no room for mistakes. But their school, with the curriculum centered on real-world research projects, not only allow mistakes but actually requires failure. (Just like life, according to one of the students. Told you they were wise...) We talked about how a good research project can only succeed if there is room for mistakes. And if you don't fail, your project is too simple and probably not very interesting. From there we headed to the main idea, that the hard part is not getting frustrated when you fail or to not cut corners when you are under a time constraint. Instead, you must be open to the failure, and learning from it. The students got that instantly, and embraced it. Wow.
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Simon Hauger, Lead Teacher of the school,
Principal, and the driving force (pun intended). |
The hour flew by and as we wrapped it up one of the students said, "Now that wasn't boring, I didn't fall asleep!"
I couldn't think of a better compliment.
(Thanks to Nick Guilbert, Director of Sustainability at The Peddie School for the photographs.)
