My seventh and eighth-grade students have been accepted into our school's prestigious STEAM program.
They are extremely bright young minds, eager to learn and always questioning.
At such a young age, they have passions they are constantly developing such as curing cancer, eliminating animal abuse worldwide, discovering efficient and environmentally friendly ways to co-exist with one another, and creating technological ways to bring history to life. This is a lot, considering many of them have not been outside of our town in South Carolina. They are curious, always wanting to know more about a topic and to discover how it relates to their personal worlds and the global community as a whole. They thrive on research and presentations, constantly aiming to bring information to those around them. Yearning for hands-on learning and firsthand experiences, my students are driven and determined. They care about their educations and know they are not too young for anything.
My Project
My students need 7 new graphing calculators to preform stimulating and rigorous STEAM related mathematical computations. Research shows that student’s best learn material in a math classroom through “multiple representations”, which means students need to see more than just an equation on the board. Graphing calculators enable the student to see an equation, the corresponding table of values, and a graphical representation of the equation in a matter of seconds, without having to go through the painstaking process of doing the computations by hand. Students can view multiple functions at once and draw conclusions based on the data that the graph represents. Most of my students come from low income households that are already struggling to provide for them. A graphing calculator for many of these families are just not feasible. It is not that they do not want to provide for their student and purchase one. It is, simply put they are unable to provide what most consider to be a luxury item. These calculators are the norm for students at wealthier schools. Either the school can afford to provide them or the parents can. Not only will these calculators be used by my students in the classroom, but they can also be used when the students take the SC EOC, SC Ready, SAT and ACT tests.
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