The Mason County Middle School has been named a Project Lead the Way distinguished school.
According to Brian McDowell, a STEM instructor, the school received the distinction for its ability to transform learning opportunities for students.
The school is just one of 148 schools in the United States to be named a distinguished school through the program.
McDowell said there are several opportunities for students through the PLTW classes.
In one class, students are learning to make air racers.
“It’s a beginning engineering class,” he said. “This is a measurement focus. When I went to school, they would have taught us how to measure and that would have been the end of it, but in this structure, what we’re doing is learning to measure and then we get a template. They have to draw it out, cut it out and built it. The next thing, we test our air racers. They have hooks on them, we pull it back and they shoot down the hall. They modify their air racer to make them go further. Eventually, a decent one will go about 10 meters. Our school record is 22 meters.”
Sixth grader Chancellor Trimble, 12, showed off one of the projects he was working on.
“We’re going to race these eventually,” he said. “We’ll have them hooked to a rubber band with a thrust on it.”
McDowell said it is a team project.
“We’ll all work together, make them better,” McDowell said.
Other PLTW projects include 3-D printing, coding, flight simulation and medical information.
“The seventh grade class is called medical detectives,” he said. “We dive much further into it. The project we’re currently working on – the kids had live patients. For example, the secretary was patient one. They had to create questions, just like a doctor would. They had to interview patients. They had a dictionary where they would match up the symptoms incubation period with what it is. They present and then argue back and forth about whether they’re right. Also, we’ll eventually have a patient with something wrong with their brain. We’ll be dissecting a sheep brain. It’s all cool stuff.”
McDowell said he believed the distinguished designation validates what is happening at MCMS.
“Being named a distinguished program by PLTW validates the decisions we have made to give the students of MCMS a diverse array of experiences to help inform their future career decisions,” he said. “An estimated 1.2 million STEM jobs will go unfilled because the workforce will not possess the skills to fill them. Many of these careers are what we all aspire to do – make a difference in the world. Whether our students want to continue the space program, cure cancer, or design the next smart phone, MCMS’s PLTW classes can start the journey.”
