PSAYDN’s STEM Ambassador Lisa Kovalchick recently trained educators from across the state on the CryptoClub curriculum at the Center for Schools and Communities. This curriculum teaches math concepts – grades 5-12 – through cryptography using puzzles and games. This training opportunity was made available through Governor Wolf’s PAsmart initiative.
A hands-on educational approach known as “playing the whole game” is taking root in schools that use project-based learning. The basic idea holds that students learn best when they understand the bigger picture and how the things they are learning fit into a larger whole. It draws inspiration from traditional afterschool undertakings such as drama, debate, sports and the like.
Girl Scouts of the USA released new badges in STEM and the outdoors, areas girls are not typically encouraged to explore outside of Girl Scouting. The badges will debut on the organization’s first digital platform for volunteers, making it more accessible than ever to unleash the power of every girl.
There is no arrival at a perfect implementation of trauma-informed practices, and no one knows this better than Mathew Portell, principal of Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Nashville. Portell has been leading Fall-Hamilton’s journey with trauma-informed practices for the past several years, and Edutopia profiled one point in this journey in May 2017. Now two years later, Edutopia checked in with the principal to see what has changed.
Every year since its founding in 1999, the Philadelphia Youth Network (PYN) has provided summer internships to high school students throughout the city.
This year, about 8,000 students spent between 120 and 160 hours at one of about 1,000 work sites throughout the city. These included IBX, Comcast, Bank of America, Drexel University, the Philadelphia Department of Parks and Recreation, and nonprofits, including PYN itself. The students are paid a minimum of $7.25 an hour, with some earning up to $12. They are chosen from about twice as many applicants.
Helping working families, keeping kids safe, and inspiring learning: afterschool works. That was the message Halie Gier, Youth Afterschool Ambassadors from Eldon, Mo., brought with her during her trip to Washington D.C. Gier has been living this message for the past six years and had the honor to tell policymakers why afterschool programs are important and how they work for her family.
Gier’s father is a single parent of six. He works in turkey barns and never knows when he will be called into work. Like most parents, he continually stresses about what is best for their family. Without afterschool, Gier and her siblings would have not had the opportunities they have now.
Just as in language arts, where readers are eventually supposed to recognize about 200 common words on sight without having to sound them out, students are expected to also be able to do basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division problems almost automatically.
To help reinforce those fundamentals, Strong School has been running “math bees” throughout the year. Along with a new teaching method, added afterschool tutoring and a slew of other programs, those drills have helped the school nearly double its math proficiency rates in one year, even if three-quarters still are not where the state wants them to be.
It is not only low-skilled factory workers whose jobs are being lost to automation; it is also many of what used to be middle-skill, middle-income jobs. This trend is leading to a “hollowing out” of the job market, with fewer jobs that require a medium skill level and at one time provided middle America with a living wage.
What remain are a smaller number of high-skill, high-income, “high-tech” jobs and lots of low-skill, low-income, “high-touch” jobs. “High-tech” jobs are engineers, software designers, architects and scientists. These jobs require college degrees or higher. “High-touch” jobs that are plentiful are farmworkers, food service personnel, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, landscape workers, security personnel, and cleaning and janitorial workers.
