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Editorial: Engaging classroom like no other
Op-Ed · April 27, 2017
West Branch High School’s robotics team reached a milestone when it traveled to Cedar Falls to compete in March, marking the first time four-year seniors led the “CyBears” in this activity.
In fact, this achievement causes a ripple effect that reaches down to the middle school — a now well-established science, technology, engineering and mathematics culture at West Branch Community Schools.
This hands-on, high-level technical thinking overlaps these STEM fields and comes from the vaguely named Project Lead The Way. PLTW ties back to a nonprofit organization with the aim of creating “an engaging classroom environment unlike any other” by presenting pupils with real-world problems and solving them by thinking critically and creatively and working together.
Readers are aware of some of the ways these classes have made the pages of the West Branch Times. The robotics team and its little brother, Lego League, at the middle school are two. Then there is the middle school project to equip and launch into the atmosphere high-altitude balloons that measure and collect data. And, coming up later this school year, the high school engineering class is building trebuchets — catapult-like devices they will take to the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site and launch seed balls into the prairie. The students must design them to fire the balls at least 100 yards using weights and levers.
These hands-on activities are a taste of how West Branch, currently using Standards-Based Grading, may soon delve into Competency-Based Education. CBE takes what is learned in SBG, then asks pupils to apply that knowledge, usually by demonstrating how it works when faced with a real problem.
The idea is that, once a student can show how to solve a problem with a hands-on activity, they are more likely to remember it.
STEM education feeds into some of the fastest-growing, highest-paying careers in America right now. The starting pay for computer programmers is about $44,450, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Robotics engineers make about $62,000 to start. While mathematicians have been around for a long time, the entry pay for them is still about $55,000. All three of these jobs, with time, can easily turn into six-digit incomes.
It is worth parents’ and pupils’ time to look into PLTW/STEM courses offered at West Branch Community Schools.
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