Maury Think Tank: Maury Engineers!

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Maury Engineers!

Maury students have taken the role of Engineers in the past few weeks, culminating with multiple events this week and "Introduce a Girl to Engineering" activities and guest speakers, the students at Maury have truly become young Engineers!

All classes have learned about and utilized the Engineer Design Process.

The motto, "Enginneers Turn Dreams into Reality" is especially relevent to the Maury students in grades K-2 because their designs WILL become reality! As you may be aware, we have a variety of grants to support a Schoolyard Improvment plan to completely revamp our "ocean of asphalt" in the back and create amazing oportunities for students at recess and for outdoor classroom space.

While a team of Maury staff have been working to develope what we would like to see, it was important for us to hear from your children. In Think Tank, K-2 students used the Engineer Design Process to share their dreams for our new space. Their designs, along with blueprints for the new space are in the front lobby for all to see. In addition, students in Ms. Scott and Ms. Hanni's class built models of their designs to bring their ideas even more to life!

Through the process, students have truly dreampt up some wonderful additions to our outdoors space... that we can actually use! How thrilling for our students!

Engineer Week was not only a time for playground design but each grade level completed Engineering challenges or had special guest speakers.

PreSchool and PreK students used the " build, test and evaluate, redesign" portion of the process to sink boats and determine which objects would float or sink.

3rd Graders had an exciting visit from Erik Donald, an Electrical Engineer who works with the Navy and Nasa to build satalites. Students had incredible questions and were excited to touch REAL materials used in space. If you havea 3rd grader, make sure to ask them about this great presenation!

Interested 3rd, 4th and 5th graders became "Lunchtime Engineers" choosing to spend their lunch period learning from Liz Twozag, a Navy engineer who works on weather satalites.