A village in Eastern Europe has been attacked. Buildings have been destroyed, borders need secured and supplies are needed. A group of Marines have two weeks to get into the village and provide assistance.
This is not a drill for soldiers. This is one of the scenarios groups of Brown County Junior High School students are tackling this semester.
“This was proposed by engineers who work at Crane, and their perspective is that this is the most common scenario that Marines deal with nowadays,” science teacher Erich Nolan said, about Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division in southern Indiana.
“They are coming into the unknown. They don’t know how bad off things are, they don’t know how many people are injured, they don’t know what the facilities are like. They know that infrastructure is down and they have to secure this village.”
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Crane is one of the industry corporations that the junior high is partnering with for a schoolwide spring project.
Crane and other corporate partners, including Cummins Engine and Columbus Regional Hospital, have presented junior high students with real-life problems to solve in groups.
Students have taken field trips to see the corporate partners’ offices. Mentors from the companies also visit the schools to help students work on their solutions to the problems.
“Everybody in this school went somewhere. They are all involved in it,” Principal Brian Garman said.
These partnerships are just one of the reasons why BCJHS received a STEM (science, technology, math, engineering) certification from the Indiana Department of Education last month.
BCJHS joins 59 other schools in the state who are now STEM-certified. To put that number in perspective, there are 472 middle schools in the state, Garman said.
“We’re excited about it. There’s been a lot of work put into it,” he said.
“To us, I think, that was just sort of a nice recognition by the state. … It wasn’t the primary goal for us. It was just like, ‘OK, we’re doing all of this and we believe in this. And oh, by the way, there’s this certification that the state has, because we’re really in line with what they are kind of moving towards.’”
What it means
Becoming STEM-certified will not change the way the way the junior high school operates now. “It’s just validating what we’re already doing,” Garman said.
Some schools initially become certified as beginning- or emerging STEM-certified schools, but Brown County Junior High School received its full certification on the first try.
IDOE visited the school twice; one visit was for an evaluation and the other was a courtesy visit to give feedback and offer suggestions on programming, Garman said.
The school also submitted an 80-page application as part of the process.
Along with community partners, the school has created school-based and community leadership teams to help guide the STEM curriculum.
The STEM journey at BCJHS began five years ago with the implementation of Project Lead they Way, which is an engineering- and technology-based curriculum. That was followed by the expansion of computer science courses and a focus on STEM-based instruction schoolwide.
One of the pieces to STEM certification is having technology at the foundation of classroom instruction.
“That’s pretty easy, because our kids are one-to-one, so all of our kids have Chromebooks and all of our teachers have really used Canvas (an online assignment program). All of our teachers make technology a big part of what they do in the classroom,” Garman said.
Other parts of STEM certification include working with students on developing communication and other “soft skills,” along with providing career education. The Brown County Career Resource Center already hosts a career speakers bureau at the school monthly.
“It’s really creating a model of teaching that really focuses on critical thinking and problem solving and collaboration,” Garman said.
“Not only is technology kind of the core of how you deliver it, but using collaborative learning, problem solving, critical thinking and trying to really incorporate that and embed that across all disciplines is one thing we continue to work on.”
Having extracurricular opportunities was another piece of the STEM certification puzzle. Over the last couple of years, the school created a Girls Who Code club, a National Science Olympiad and Robotics Club.
“It’s just another opportunity for kids to really explore more in-depth something they are interested in that is related to STEM,” Garman said.
Real problems
On the afternoon of April 26, seventh and eighth-graders gather around their Chromebooks, working on their presentation for their plan to help the Eastern Europe villagers who have been attacked.
About an hour-and-a-half was set aside at the end of the school days that week to give students time to finalize their presentations.
“Our task is, we have to go into a village that’s been recently attacked in Eastern Europe. We have to restore law and order,” eighth-grader Marie Fields said. “There are still adversaries in the area and there’s a language barrier, so we don’t know what language they speak.”
This group decided to split the work among their five members: Creating a timeline of action for the two weeks Marines are there; exploring the 3D map to figure out where to establish headquarters and what buildings need repaired; writing military briefings that examine the culture in that area of Europe; and creating a list of materials needed to provide relief and security for the villagers.
“Since this is in another country and they have a different culture than us (Izzy Williams) has been researching Eastern Europe, so the languages they speak, what types of food they speak, what their morals are, their religion, so that we don’t come in and offend them or anything,” Fields said of the military briefings.
Fields and Savannah Oden were working on the material list. “We have to come up with a complete list of materials that we have to take with us on our mission. We only have two semi-trailers worth of supplies we can bring,” Fields said. “We have everything from tools that we’ll need for infrastructure, what we’re going to bring for food, what we’re going to bring for weapons. It’s a very extensive list.”
Joey Denison said he thinks it’s good that students are addressing real-world problems through this project. “I’m looking into coding (as a career), which uses a lot of problem solving and working in groups,” he said.
The students said they enjoyed visiting Crane earlier this year. “It was really educational, but also fun at the same time, because we got to see basically everything they do and use on a daily basis,” Denison said.
“I thought it was a lot to take in, with all of the technology that they had and what they usually did on a daily basis,” eighth-grader Rhett Silbaugh added.
Williams said she thought Crane letting the students visit was generous, “because everything they do there is really, super secretive. We didn’t get to go into like all of the rooms and see a bunch of stuff, but we got to see a lot, and that’s pretty big for seventh- and eighth-graders,” she said.
This group has worked on their project after school, too.
“It’s not really about the grade for me. I mean, I want a good grade, but it’s experience, it’s problem solving, it’s getting to work with a group and getting used to doing stuff like this in the future. It’s fun,” Denison said.
Brown County High School graduate Bryan Rushton was acting as a mentor at the school that afternoon. He now works for LHP Engineering Solutions in data analytics. LHP is another industry partner for the junior high.
“It’s really neat (to return to Brown County Schools) because I realize now how good of an education I got in Brown County, because I literally now deal with companies all over the world. What I kind of once thought was just this little school in the middle of the woods … equipped me very well to compete on the world stage,” he said.
LHP’s challenge for the kids was to come up with a creative idea to use “raspberry pies,” which are small, cheap computers that can have hundreds of different sensors connected to them.
Students visited LHP’s office in Columbus. “I think after that, they all got some ideas, and now they’ve just been thinking through how they do it,” he said.
Rushton said he was impressed with the way the students were handling the challenge. “Some of the kids we could almost hire, they are so good at coding, today,” he said.
While Rushton was talking, eighth-grader Blaike Walden walked up to ask a question about raspberry pie data.
“I honestly think it’s very helpful for our school and for everyone to get a chance to see if this is kind of what they want to do in the future,” Walden said of the project. “I’ve always been interested in technology.”
Groups working for Columbus Regional Hospital were tasked with proposing an idea for use of the former Clarion Hotel in Columbus that CRH recently bought and demolished.
“They had to do a little demographic research and look at what community needs might be, then propose what the hospital should be there based on that,” Nolan said.
Representatives from all of the industry partners have been invited to come and listen to the solutions and ideas the students came up with. The partners and teachers will then work together to decide which students get to present to industry executives at their respective companies.
“It’s been messy, but a big focus with our kids is we’re trying to teach them to not be afraid to fail. Failure is part of trying challenging things,” Nolan said.
“It answers that question: When will we use this in real life? This is, ‘OK, these are real-life scenarios for all of these companies …’ These kids are doing the most authentic work we can provide for them.”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”‘Integrated learning’ crosses all class boundaries” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Each nine weeks, Brown County Junior High School students get a new topic to study across all of their classes. This grading period, seventh-graders are exploring the question, ‘How does overpopulation and disease threaten humanity or mankind?’
Teachers across all of the disciplines will address this question, Principal Brian Garman said.
“It’s not just pandemics or epidemics; we’ll look at overpopulation and how it squeezes natural resources and food resources, so how does it really affect the existence of humanity in general?” he said. “In all of those classes, they should get sick and tired of hearing about overpopulation and disease, because they’ll be getting saturated with it.”
An integrated curriculum — working across the subject divides of math, science, reading, social studies and other classes — is another part of the school’s STEM certification.
“I think we as a staff believe it’s really important that kids understand disciplines don’t exist in vacuums,” Garman said. “They are all interrelated, and if you want to be successful, not only do you have to have skills that are offered in all of these different disciplines, but to have a real understanding of the world and an understanding that some of the big questions that are out there, you have to understand they all link.”
Seventh-grader Savannah Oden said having integrated learning in her classes is useful. “If we’re all talking about the same thing in different subjects, they are basically preparing us for when we’re in the workforce when we have to use multiple fields to work on something,” she said.
Seventh-grader Joey Denison agreed. “It takes the skills you learn and applies it to an actual problem. But at the same time, you’re having fun,” he said.
Earlier in the school year, students studied water in all of their classes.
“They taught us so much about the water unit that I’m still having dreams about what they taught us in that water unit,” seventh-grader Izzy Williams said.
For teachers, the integrated curriculum requires more communication among them all. “I would say it’s a new experience,” social studies teacher Justin Schwenk said.
“We’re growing each year. It’s a learning curve, and we’re developing that and getting better.”
Integrated learning requires him to approach his social studies lessons from a more contemporary standpoint, he added.
“That doesn’t stop you from being able to still do the history. The history informs the modern. But it just means that we have to rethink the balance of what we teach. But I love it,” he said. “… If that means I have to do a little science in social studies, then all the better.”
This type of learning also gives students a different perspective.
“They’re already coming to you with an idea in their head, and that’s good, so you’re not always starting with a blank slate every single time,” Schwenk said.
“That when we’re talking about something in social studies, it could be impacted by science. It could be impacted by math,” Garman added. “It’s all interrelated.”
[sc:pullout-text-end]
