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Last week I attended the Indiana STEM Education Conference at Purdue. It is a very quick day. There was a keynote, session, vendor hall, session, lunch, 2 sessions and done. There were about 60 sessions to choose from, often several in the same time slot to attend. It is a good idea to take a… Read more »

No, not really. We did 3 days of electricity with 4th graders at Unionville Elementary. We talked about energy and electrical energy (& chemical & solar & heat…), batteries, conductors, insulators, transformation…A bunch of Q & A (not always directly related..but that works still). They each got several 5 mm LED’s and a CR2032 battery… Read more »

We had some pretty good numbers for 2024 , even though we were off for almost 1.5 months of summer when the grants funds didnt line up.  We had to cancel a few events then and had stopped scheduling because of that possibility. I was hoping Summer 2024 was going to entail a breakthrough in… Read more »

Recently, I was in need of some grid paper. Not x-y graph paper, but paper with squares and dots on it. And I wanted 11×17 capability. There are many online where you can choose what grids/dots you want , then download and print. Here are a couple : https://print-graph-paper.com/ https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ This second one has a… Read more »

Eastern Green Middle School 6th Graders are reading The Last Beekeeper I took my cardboard tools, assorted cardboard and craft materials (pipe cleaners, craft sticks, straws, coffee stirrers, buttons, pom poms, batteries & bulbs)) to them. Their task was to make something important from the book. They were new to the cardboard tools, so those… Read more »

Eastern Greene Schools had a community fun run on a Saturday at their track. I set up a variety of activities Of course there was paper circuits. I also had some necklace trinkets (fairies, gnomes, thunderbird) to make a necklace. PVC pipes for construction. But the most popular was string art. It was a chilly… Read more »

One of the projects we have been working on is “hands” The pre-school traced their hands and “signed” them. Our job was to cut it out of wood for an ornament. We took pictures, removed the background using RemoveBG, imported that file into Lightburn and traced it. Often we had to adjust the trace specs… Read more »

Some students at Owen Valley High School formed a group to raise money to help rebuild a bridge at McCormick’s Creek State Park. I had spoken with 1 student and the librarian about sublimation and they asked if they could borrow my equipment in order to sublimate some products to sell at the Christmas on… Read more »

I got a little behind in posting my travels, so the next few posts are out of chronological order. … I will get back in order in January.

I got in my sleigh and headed South to Crawford County. We landed at East Crawford Elementary, in a Fourth Grade classroom. We got to talk about electricity and find out what ideas or words or people they already knew. They hit upon how we use electricity for almost everything, how it is made (corrected… Read more »