Museum Roadshows Aid School Budgets
Posted on May 3rd, 2010 by ASEE
Facing tight budgets and other pressures, schools are taking fewer museum field trips. So museums are taking their shows on the road, via travel programs, videoconferencing, and computer-based lessons. Yet, some worry that kids will lose out, missing “the wow factor of actually seeing that huge Triceratops skeleton.”
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Tags: Education Policy, Museum, Museums
When the Space Shuttle program is grounded later this year, after nearly 30 years of service, quite a few scientists, engineers, and technicians could find themselves jettisoned into the ranks of the unemployed. So why not turn some of them into teachers? That’s the notion behind the proposed Space to School Act introduced in Congress by Democratic Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, of Florida, reports the Orlando Sentinel. 
A Houston area school district plans to open an Academy of Game Design this fall at Willowridge High School. Students will learn the basics of game design, including 2D and 3D animation, graphics, lighting, and sound mixing. Computer game developer Rodney Gibbs applauds the idea. His work invovles a great deal of calculus, physics, engineering, computer science,” he says. But for young people, “video games are like the cheese on broccoli.”
Student at Dallas’s independent Lakehill Preparatory School are enjoying their new $2.2 million Family Environmental Center, the Dallas Morning News reports. The idea for the center came from headmaster Roger Perry after he took noticed a swath of vacant land next to the school’s ball fields. The result is an impressive LEED standards complex that houses three science labs, a large meeting hall, and a retention pond. 
Can intensive teacher-training courses help turn inadequate math teachers into classroom stars? Apparently not — at least not immediately. That’s the conclusion of a new Department of Education report, which found that intensive, state-of-the-art efforts to boost teachers’ skills don’t seem to lead to significant improvements in student achievement.
The set of common academic standards most states are expected to adopt this year got strong reviews from veteran K-12 teachers in Baltimore. The teachers — who include former Teachers of the Year — read and rated the draft common core standards and generally gave them thumbs up. 
Physicist Sean Carroll says high school physics classes place too much emphasis on dry puzzle-solving and pulleys. “One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we’ve taken this incredibly interesting subject — how the universe works — and made it boring,” he says.
Rube Goldberg was an engineer-turned-Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist who specialized in whimsical drawings of complicated machines designed to perform the simplest of tasks. For 23 years, the Rube Goldberg Machine contest at Purdue University has inspired high school and college teams to construct working models of the wacky machines. This year’s winner? Thorp High School in Wisconsin.
