Directions for Book Blogging

Welcome to our summer book blog! Unlike most blogs that have one blogger- everyone gets to blog about the book, To Engineer is Human, and share ideas about K-12 engineering education and the "human side" of engineering. To reply to a post, click on Comments at the bottom of the post. To start a new post, click on New Post at the top right. However, to start a new post you have to have a Google account. If you don't want to register on Google, you can send me the text for your post and a title, and I will post it for you.

Who do we have on the blog? Our book blog consists of 16 high school teachers, 1 middle school teacher, 7 elementary teachers, 4 faculty or engineering students from the University of Maine, 3 MMSA staff, and 2 DOE staff. We have a diverse and well-rounded book group which should lead to some interesting conversations. One thing to remember- the most recent post is always at the top of the blog. If you haven't been on for awhile, scroll down and work backwards.

If you start a new post you also have the option of adding photos or other graphics as well as making a hyperlink. Play around with it a bit to get to know how it works. Try a test post- you can always delete it afterwards. Also, you will notice we will build a collection of links listed on the right. Since only the person (Page) with the Google account can add these, if you have any you would like to share, just send them to me at pagekeeley@gmail.com and I will post them for you. This is the first time we have ever tried this as a blog, so we're all getting our feet wet. Don't hesitate to wade right in!

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Slingshot

The slingshot story repeated the ideas that have been shared by Petroski and particpants.
-Plan, build, try, fail, rethink,  build, try.... The process is as important as the end product. This is where the true learning happens for our students. I thought this sentence said so much, " He learned to learn from mistakes." That is what we need to bring into our classrooms.
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3 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 18, 2012 at 6:07 PM

    This story is a great one of having fun and failing fast and failing cheap!

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  2. Dawn MarieJuly 31, 2012 at 6:05 AM

    I agree, repeated throughout the book is the importance of learning from mistakes. In second grade we say,"Mistakes are our friends."
    I don't know who first coined it, perhaps an engineer.

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  3. AnonymousAugust 3, 2012 at 8:08 PM

    Dawn, I wished I had you as my 2nd grade teacher, or high school teacher, or college professor. This message is huge " mistakes are our friends...although at the high school level I would addthis caveat "especially if we learn from them". I loved the story of the sling shot- the decreasing and increasing happiness within his son and the final satisfaction and pride of his ultimate sling shot. It reminds me a little of my father spending time with each of my 3 brothers when they did the pinewood derby in Boy Scouts (all boy scouts are given the same piece of pine, wheels, axles, etc to make the fastest possible car go down track...powered only by the potential energy of the given height of the slope. I wish we did something like that in Girl Scouts...another reason I was in it for one year. I always wanted to do what the Boy Scouts were doing :)

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