After a productive week in June with Nate Piper creating the framework of the course, these three weeks in July are the time to get the nuts and bolts for the MSI units down on paper.
In June, Nate got us set up in Google Docs and all materials for the course will be created and shared there. We will also use Haiku as the main course website to communicate with students and for students to access useful and needed information.
We also plan on students using Blogger to record their progress and write reflections -- or "blocuments" about the work that they do. To get a feel for how students will use Blogger, I will record my progress in writing materials for the course over the next several weeks.
I have made good progress on Unit 1 and like the activities that we have planned for that unit. The purpose of the first unit is to give students experience with the engineering design process and to give some common math foundation on functions to all students.
One exciting aspect of the course, mathematically, is the potential we have to establish several important mathematical themes to everyone at the same time. While I believe our math sectioning system (3 levels) is necessary in the other grades (for a variety of reasons), one drawback to it is that students are hitting different problems and concepts at different times. In the MSI course, we can have everyone learning important ideas (or exploring familiar ideas in different ways) at the same time, thus setting the foundation for future math learning. In the first unit, this will be done with the concept of "functions" -- a fundamental and central idea of mathematics.
