Looking Back at 10 years of EdCamps Oh how the time flies, EdCamp Madison is turning 10 this year! It will be held Saturday, February 3rd at Sun Prairie West High School. Which can be found at 2850 Ironwood Drive in Sun Prairie Wisconsin from 8:30 am - 3:00 pm. Get more information and register here: https://sites.google.com/sunprairieschools.org/edcampmadwi/home I will always remember sitting in my first EdCamp opening session at the very first EdCamp Madison and having no clue what I was in for. So, I’d like to take this space to go over some of the basic rules of EdCamp. No One Will Pitch It for You EdCamps are unconferences. By this I mean that they have a blank slate of sessions for the day. There may be a few predetermined sessions, but ultimately the session topics are determined by attendees during the pitch & plan session that opens the day. If an idea gets pitched there will be a session on it. If a topic doesn’t get pitched, there won’t be a session on it. So, it i
I'm going to keep the text of this blog short because the real action is in the videos in the Storify below! Today was our final collaboration with Angela Patterson, Kate Sommerville, and TEAM Togetherness of the year. We decided to take the marble roller coaster project we do over the course of a week in AP Physics to study conservation of energy, rotational motion, and centripetal forces and bring it to the 4th graders. In order to scale down a 5 day activity into a 2 hour time frame, we changed the ultimate goal just a bit. The design challenge for the teams was to build a marble coaster which had 3 obstacles. Obstacles could be hills, loops, jumps, or corkscrews. Each team was made up of a group of 4th graders and 2 - 3 AP students serving as coaches. The role of the coaches was to Help complete the team’s vision and stay within the rules. Aid in construction and making the 4th graders' design ideas a reality. Let the 4th graders fail, help them unde