Students collaborating on a math challenge
The leaves have turned amber and we hope you are looking forward to bountiful, enriching Thanksgiving celebrations.
We have some news and updates we would like to share with you.
News from the Classrooms
Starfire teachers work to ignite a lifelong passion for problem solving and STEAM for their students. We are proud to share some news from our classrooms.
Electrical Engineering at La Entrada
Adrian and Augustine facilitated a paper towers challenge. Students split into teams to design a tower that would meet certain design objectives. They then presented their design to acquire "funding" which they spent on the materials to actually construct their tower. Students enjoyed the competitive and open-ended nature of the challenge, while gaining insight into engineering in a more professional environment.
Scratch Coding at Oak Knoll
Iheoma led the class in creating Flappy, a game in which a character experiences gravity acting on them while needing to dodge obstacles that are flying at random angles across the screen. The project links movement and cartesian coordinates, as well as conditional logic to change characters or obstacle appearance. Students also created a score and high-score screen to interact with variables in the scratch environment.
Math Games at Laurel Lower
Ying introduced dominoes to the class. She used the numbers on each domino for a math game. Students were instructed to use the proper combinations of dominoes to represent a number with more than one digit. The purpose of the math problem was to derive the desired addition and/or subtraction results. Students in higher graders were encouraged to extend their work to the multiplication and division. Ying encouraged the students to find different ways to achieve the same arithmetic result, so that they could expand their abilities to interact with numbers flexibly. Student were emboldened to take risks and share their reasoning with classmates.
Starfire Teacher Profile
Starfire Education teachers share their passion with students every day in classrooms around the Bay
Ying is a former university lecturer in Electrical Engineering, a parent, a Cupertino Union School District volunteer, and a Starfire educator
Learn more about our amazing team at: https://www.starfireed.com/about-nav