Alissa, giving hope through Colin's Story, teaching us about water safety.
Team Thinkwell, stuffing packets.
Niko, from Tech Support sorting safety cards and arm bands.
Kent Fuka is dedicated to STEM education. Not only is he chairman and CFO of Thinkwell, but he's also an advisor for AfterMath Education, a nonprofit group in New Mexico that provides extracurricular STEM education for middle- and high-school students.
Their series of 4-day summer camps is coming up soon, and if you're in the Albuquerque area, we highly recommend checking it out. With a unique blend of traditional teaching techniques, hands-on experiments, and even exercise classes, AfterMath Camp has something to offer every student, from those who struggle with STEM subjects to those who excel. Students who sign up will get to prepare for standardized tests, strengthen STEM skills, and of course, have fun.
For more information on AfterMath, visit their website or contact them.
- string with which to hang the lantern
For many bright students, making a mistake on a homework assignment or test is one of the worst feelings in the world. But could mistakes play a vital role in the learning process? According to a growing number of educators, the answer is yes.
In his book Teach Like
a Champion, Doug Lemov says, "Error followed by correction and instruction is
the fundamental process of schooling...teachers should normalize error and
respond to both parts of this sequence as if they were totally and completely
normal. After all, they are." Lemov isn't the only one who sees failure as an
integral part of education. In their excerpt of his book,
website Delancey Place notes that his philosophy reminds them of the motto of
the engineering department at "the Franklin Institute's nationally recognized
Science Leadership Academy": Fail early, fail often.
Even the New York Times is reconsidering
the value of failure. In an article
on the effectiveness of homework, author Annie Murphy Paul writes, "When we work
hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals
the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known as
cognitive disfluency, promotes learning so effectively that psychologists have
devised all manner of 'desirable difficulties' to introduce into the learning
process: for example, sprinkling a passage with punctuation mistakes..." Making
and then correcting errors may be akin to those "desirable difficulties," the
struggle ultimately heightening students' ability to grasp a given concept.
We at Thinkwell are no strangers to this approach to learning. In fact, Professor Edward Burger, the star of Thinkwell's math lectures, considers it one of the most valuable parts of the educational process. "In all my courses," he says, "I emphasize the power of failure: learning from failed attempts and taking risks." In The Heart of Mathematics, the textbook Prof. Burger coauthored, the second item in his list of the top ten mathematical ways of thinking is "Make mistakes and fail but never give up."
How have you and your students approached errors and failure? Do you view them as obstacles to success or as stepping-stones on your way to mastering a subject? Have you found any techniques particularly helpful in learning to view mistakes as a good thing?
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Halloween is just around the corner, and while most of us will have fun with candy and costumes, there are also plenty of ways to make the holiday a learning opportunity for your homeschool students.
Last Friday, Thinkwell got the opportunity to give back to our community through the Entrepreneur's Foundation's annual Fall Service Day. This year, over 500 volunteers from almost two dozen companies came to Austin's Zilker Park to build park benches, weed out invasive plant species, plant wildflowers, and much more.
Thinkwell volunteers were assigned to the Rattlesnake Team, which meant that we got to help clean up the Umlauf Sculpture Garden. The Sculpture Garden is apart from the rest of Zilker in a shady grove full of compelling artwork and verdant plant life--in short, you'd be hard-pressed to think of a more beautiful place to spend the day raking leaves and clearing debris from pathways to make them more wheelchair-accessible.
At lunch, a series of speakers from Austin's Parks and Recreation department taught us about the park's importance. From hosting festivals like Austin City Limits to helping preserve the habitat of the Barton Springs salamander, Zilker plays many roles in the community--plus the playgrounds and swimming areas make it a fantastic place for kids! Thinkwell is proud to have played our part in keeping Zilker Park and the city of Austin beautiful.
Photo courtesy of Umlauf Sculpture Garden website.
Labor Day weekend has come and gone, and that means today is the first day of school for lots of students--including homeschool students. How can homeschool parents make sure that first day is exciting and fun for their children? Here are some tips from around the homeschool blogosphere.
The Creative Homeschool recommends borrowing some traditions from the conventional first day of school, like buying new school supplies or a new outfit:
It's fun to have something new to wear, even though we don't invest in a whole wardrobe at one time.
...when we began homeschooling, we decided to continue first-day-of-school photos. Without lunch boxes, the children hold their favorite schoolbooks in their hands for the picture-taking session.
Let your children help plan your curriculum. This is one preparation the public schools can't match. For instance, younger children might be asked to make a list of things they want to learn about in science. You can work together to choose the topics you want to study.
...the "official" [first] day is on Tuesday, but we want Friday off, so we started today. It's kinda nice having that flexibility!
Back-to-school season is upon us, but there's still plenty of time to take advantage of summer freedom with a trip to the zoo. Visiting the zoo is the perfect way to combine education with interactivity, and it's fun for both kids and adults--not to mention that it's a perfect activity for homeschool students.
As the Internet becomes more omnipresent, students use more and more academic resources online. Conducting research online can be daunting, whether you grew up hunting and pecking on a typewriter or had your own website by age nine. How do you tell which sources are reliable? And how do you incorporate them into a paper or essay? We're here to help! We previously blogged about how to use Wikipedia for research, and this post will cover how to cite Thinkwell and other online sources. Author. (Publication date). Document title. Retrieved from URL
Thinkwell. (2000). Biology: Animal systems and homeostasis; The digestive system;The beginning of chemical digestion. Retrieved from http://www.thinkwell.com
(Author, year, page number if applicable)
Chemical digestion is an important part of the digestive system (Thinkwell, 2000).
Author. "Document Title." Website Title. Name of organization running the website, date of publication. Web. Date of access.
Thinkwell. "Weak Acids." Thinkwell Chemistry. Thinkwell, 2000. Web. 15 Jul 2011.<http://www.thinkwell.com>.
(Author)
Strong acids are more dissociated than weak acids (Thinkwell).
When you think of non-linear mathematics, your mind may not jump immediately to crocheting, but Thinkwell's summer intern Gregory Becker found a really cool way to combine the two. For his high-school senior thesis, he crocheted a Lorenz manifold. What exactly is a Lorenz manifold? I'll let him explain in his own words:Here's a close-up of Gregory's Lorenz manifold, which has 25,511 stitches (!) and took just over 150 hours (!!) to crochet and mount.
The less famous image of the system is the Lorenz manifold. Impossible to represent accurately in a stable two-dimensional medium, the Lorenz manifold sits between the wings and represents the collection of paths by which the leaf collides with the obstacle.
Because of the challenge in representing the Lorenz manifold, a small niche of the mathematical community has taken to crocheting it. Crocheting works well for representing the manifold for two reasons: It can warp, and it can represent a lattice."
