Area schools show off classroom projects at Innovation Showcase
Eric Morris | Herald-Standard
Login Mullins, a sixth-grade student at Connellsville Area Middle School, displays a Raspberry Pi computer, used to power a weather station at Dunbar Township Elementary School that is monitored by fifth-grade students. The elementary school purchased 25 of the devices last school year through an Innovation Grant to implement the weather station and to provide students programming opportunities on accompanying Pi-Top Ceed laptops.
Beth-Center Elementary School fifth-grade student Ava Zibrida poses with her puppet, Mr. Rogers, which she designed and created from scratch as part of year-long, multimedia project during the 2017-18 school year. Using funds from an Innovation Grant, students in Sherrie Silvio's fourth-grade art class used hands and machines to sew puppets of famous Pennsylvanians, then developed scripts and filmed videos starring their puppets using green screen technology.
Bria Jamison, a junior at Jefferson-Morgan High School, explains how students enrolled in engineering courses in the district created items using various machines funded in part by an Innovation Grant from Chevron and the Benedum Foundation. In front of Jamison is a student-designed T-shirt launcher used at home athletic events.
Login Mullins, a sixth-grade student at Connellsville Area Middle School, explains a device he used last year as a fifth-grader at Dunbar Township Elementary School that records weather statistics at the school using technology programmed and monitored by students. The technology was purchased with Innovation Grant funding from Chevron and the Benedum Foundation.
Innovation was on display Tuesday when students and teachers from several area schools joined other leaders in education to showcase cutting-edge learning programs.
Area schools accounted for more than one-third of participants in the inaugural Innovation Showcase at the West Virginia University Erickson Alumni Center in Morgantown, W.Va., for recipients of Innovation Grants awarded by Chevron Corp. and the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation to put their STEM-based classroom programs on display.
Innovation Grants were awarded to 43 classroom across Southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia in 2017-18 to expand STEM and STEAM programming. Twenty-six schools convened on Tuesday to showcase a year of work.
The grants seek to encourage school districts, primarily in rural communities, to develop engaging programs and curricula with innovation and design serving as the driving force behind science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, or STEAM, education. The funding has enabled teachers to expand curricula beyond the textbook and provide students with hands-on learning opportunities.
Innovation Grants are presented in collaboration with Pennsylvania Intermediate Unit 1, which serves Fayette, Greene and Washington counties, and the West Virginia Regional Education Service Agency 6 & 7.
“These grants are a great opportunity to give schools a push to get projects off the ground that they may not have had the chance or the funding to do before,” said Sarah D’Urzo, coordinator for innovation and design at IU1.
“It gives teachers the chance to expand, whether it’s a club or maybe taking a unit and turning it into a full-blown class,” D’Urzo said.
For Dunbar Township Elementary School in the Connellsville Area School District, the grant meant having the funding to purchase equipment to build a weather station, programmed and monitored by fifth-grade students, using a Raspberry Pi computer to record live weather statistics at the school and relay the information to the school’s Weather Underground webpage.
“Realistically, for $65, you have yourself a weather station,” said the Melissa Saveikis, the school’s media specialist, explaining that students incorporate the weather results into the school’s TV news broadcast as a five-day forecast. And with a stock of Raspberry Pi to power Pi-Top Ceed laptops, students can built weather biomes as well as practice with various coding platforms.
Bethlehem-Center Elementary School art teacher Sherrie Silvio used Innovation Grant funding last year to provide fourth-grade students with a year-long project that “truly was every letter of STEAM,” she said, as students used hands and machines to design and sew puppets of iconic Pennsylvanians from scratch.
The students then developed scripts and filmed videos starring their puppets using green screen technology. The grant paid for sewing machines, a laptop for video editing and additional materials.
“It was all student-driven. I just gave them the equipment and they did everything,” Silvio said of the cross-disciplinary project that yielded 88 puppets.
Other participants at the Innovation Showcase were Friendship Hill/Smithfield Elementary and Albert Gallatin North Middle from the Albert Gallatin Area School District, Bullskin Township Elementary from the Connellsville Area School District, Jefferson-Morgan High School, Mapletown Jr.-Sr. High School from the Southeastern Greene School District and West Greene High School.
The Innovation Grant program continues into its second year in the 2018-19 school year with the award of nearly $175,000 to 37 classrooms in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, including schools in the Albert Gallatin, Beth-Center, Brownsville Area, Central Greene, Connellsville Area, Frazier, Laurel Highlands, Southeastern Greene, Uniontown Area and West Greene school districts, for various STEM and STEAM initiatives.
In 2017 and 2018, Chevron and the Benedum Foundation awarded $370,000 in Innovation Grants to classrooms across the region.
The grants are part of the Appalachia Partnership Initiative, a multi-year partnership established with an initial $20 million commitment from Chevron that seeks to strengthen economic and education environments by supporting long-term STEM and technical training programs.