Stillwater NewsPress

Local News

October 31, 2011

Stillwater Middle School receives technology grant

By Silas Allen sallen@stwnewspress.com

STILLWATER, Okla. — In a corner of Becky Hammack's classroom at Stillwater Middle School sit a handful of boxes. Inside those boxes is several thousand dollars of brand-new classroom technology.

The school received the new equipment last week, Hammack said, and she's already planning ways to put it to use.

Most of the new equipment is probeware — essentially handheld computers — that teachers and students at the school will be using to collect data during lab projects.

Hammack said the devices can be put to any number of uses — they can test for the presence of gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide, they can be used as handheld GPS devices and they can work with classroom robotics equipment the school already has.

The devices were funded through a $10,000 grant from Vernier Software and Technology, an Oregon-based classroom technology manufacturer. The school was one of 30 grant recipients nationwide. Other recipients included Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville, Hattiesburg High School in Hattiesburg, Miss., and Joel C. Harris Academy in San Antonio. Stillwater Middle School was the only Oklahoma recipient.

Some of Hammack's students have previous experience with the one of devices, she said. During the school's summer engineering camp, Hammack worked with students on a project that involved a disaster scenario.

In the scenario, a town had recently been devastated by a hurricane, leaving its wastewater facility crippled. During the project, students tested samples of cloudy, polluted water to find what was dissolved in it. Students then built filters to clean the water — in some cases, bringing it close to the Environmental Protection Agency's clean drinking water standards, Hammack said.

During the project, Hammack said, the school only had one of the devices, meaning students had to take turns using it. Having more of the devices will allow Hammack and her students to make better use of class time, she said.

Eventually, Hammack said, she hopes to be able to use the devices to encourage students to pursue their own ideas. Up to now, she said, her students have generally work on lab projects on an assigned basis — she would give them a lab to work on and they would complete it. Hammack said she hopes to be able to take the students out into the school’s nature trail and pond and have them come up with their own questions and then form and test hypotheses.

For now, she said, she's incorporating the devices into activities the classes were already doing.

For example, she said, students are using temperature probes to look at how the tilt of the earth affects temperature at certain points. Students can also use the devices to test the pH of solutions where they had been using less-precise pH paper strips.

"We're doing the things we already did in a more high-tech way," she said.

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