Month: November 2015

Lighting Up Van Gogh’s Starry Night

Throughout this school year, the Roughneck Tech Club has been learning how to create circuits. Using some copper tape, LED lights and a watch battery, the students lit up Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

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The students followed a template to lay down the copper tape in parallel strips.  Next, students added LED lights from Chibitronics. Carefully, each light was positioned in between the parallel strips of copper with the positive and negative sides of the lights facing the same direction.  The final step included adding a small battery to the circuit. Students placed the battery at the beginning of the circuit with the negative side of the battery on the negative copper strip.  By folding the positive copper strip on top of the negative one, the circuit is complete; thus, lighting up the LED lights. The students secured the battery with an alligator clip.  Some students experienced difficulty creating a complete circuit. Instead of giving up, they retraced their steps and found the problem. Errors included the copper strips not fully adhering to the page, LED lights not touching both positive and negative copper strips and copper strips that overlapped. By using their problem solving skills, the students of the Roughneck Tech Club proved they can adapt and overcome obstacles with some simple team work.

A special thanks to Mr. Randy Rodgers, Director of Digital Learning Services at Sequin ISD, for supplying the idea and expertise for this project.

The Winter Around the World Project!

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Today, students at WOMS started the #WinterAroundtheWorld project. Teacher-Librarian, Shannon Miller, invited the students at White Oak Middle School to join classes around the globe to celebrate winter.  The project is inspired  by the children’s book Winter, The Coldest Season of All by Lisa Bell.  The students will compose songs, draw illustrations, write poems and short stories to be included in an eBook.  IMG_0140

Shannon Miller Skyped with the students as they listened to the audio book and enjoyed the illustrations by Emily Brooks. Ms. Miller shared tech tools including StoryBird, Buncee and Canva to highlight ways students can share their creations. Students left inspired to begin their Winter Around the World projects.