By Dave Janosz, on February 27th, 2014  To kick off a new blog category that I will use to post rants about education in general, I’ll focus on one of my pet peeves about schools, which is what I like to call “Hallway Sitting Duty.” Walk into any school and you will find various professionals that are made to sit in the hall for any given period of time, usually to pester kids for their hall pass (which is another relic I’ll deal with at another time). Having done this for hours over my career, I can’t recall ever doing anything I’d consider to be critical while on hall duty.
If it’s that important for someone to see whatever it is the hallway monitor person can see, put a camera there instead. Not only is this kind of activity insulting to someone that spent four years in a college classroom and most likely more to get an advanced degree, it is borderline demeaning. Teachers certainly have better things to do and accomplish in another place in the school to support their students.
If you’re the type that’s more convinced by numbers, let’s explore the dollars and cents. The average teacher’s salary in the US in 2013 was $56,383. A typical teacher might work 1,260 hours a year in school (not counting any time they spend on work outside of the school). So, that comes to about $45 per hour. In the seven hours school is in session per school day it’s costing the school district $315 per day for each hall monitor post. That’s a total of $56,700 per hallway post, which is FRIGHTENINGLY close to the average teacher salary per year, isn’t it? So, yes, take the number of hallway monitor spots in a building and yes, it is costing a full year teacher’s salary to have EACH one of them. Today, a pretty capable camera system will run about $100 per camera on average or less.
So, let’s dedicate this lost resource of time and money to some other professional needs. These folks could be coaching instruction or helping colleagues with technology instead.
By Dave Janosz, on February 26th, 2014 Cost: $1.99
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
Grade Levels: 7-12
iPad App Link
I generally see promise in any app related to technology and engineering, and I saw it here too in a concept to bring a structural design app to the iPad. But, this one misses the mark.
This app seems to try to make a truss structure game too much like Angry Birds in how it scores at the expense of basic understanding of how some of the elements work. I realize there are general explanations in the Help section, but the help should be more prominent and there once you are in the interface. It also lacks certain seemingly obvious user interface elements such as an “undo” button and a tap to take you to the next challenge once you’ve completed the current one. Finally, especially for a younger inexperienced audience, it would be helpful for each challenge level to actually state what exactly the challenge is. It took me, an experienced iPad user, and someone that has used software like this to some amateur extent, way too long to figure out how to manipulate things in the build area. For now, stick to the desktop/laptop and web versions of this type of software.
Perhaps, the developer will take some feedback and incorporate it quickly into a better release.
By Dave Janosz, on February 14th, 2014
 Written by David Janosz Jr., ‘Engineers Decide’ was designed to inspire and educate future engineers and children who have a curiosity about the engineered items they encounter everyday. The first of its kind, the book tackles subject matter that has, to date, never been published in an interactive electronic format. It is built with interactive multimedia and multi-touch tools available through iBooks Author and is exclusively “Made for iBooks,” Apple’s leading eBook platform.
For Immediate Release
Frederick, MD – In 2008, author and educator David Janosz began to search for picture books to read to his oldest son, and noticed a discrepancy in the works available.
“I noticed that there were a large number of books available about people working in a limited few professions like fire fighters, artists, athletes and celebrities, rather than books about more prevalent occupations,” Janosz says.
Further, the author could find no books related to engineering, one of the world’s most popular professions.
With the release of ‘Engineers Decide’, an interactive iBook available for free through March 31, 2014 in 51 countries supported by iBooks, Janosz hopes to fill the gap in the market.
“I wrote and published ‘Engineers Decide’ because I want every young person to be able to envision himself or herself doing engineering,” he says. “I know that most will not become engineers, but too many children never even see the possibility.”
Ideal for parents or teachers with children ages five through ten, ‘Engineers Decide’ explains that engineering isn’t about “things” but about individuals, inspired to bring forth the discoveries that will change our world. By instilling the joy of designing the future – whether as part of a team or working solo – ‘Engineers Decide’ ignites children’s curiosity to the wonders of applying their imagination to meet fresh challenges.
Synopsis:
Awaken the young engineer within your student or child! Ideal for ages five through ten, Engineers Decide explains that engineering isn’t about “things” but about individuals, inspired to bring forth the discoveries that will change our world. By instilling the joy of designing the future – whether as part of a team or working solo – Engineers Decide ignites children’s curiosity to the wonders of applying their imagination to meet fresh challenges. Engineers deciding upon solutions for product development, as well as all sorts of inventions familiar to children, are described simply and depicted with colorful artwork. And photos show children actively participating in the adventure of discovering next-generation technology. Filled with interactive graphics and videos, Engineers Decide stirs tomorrow’s engineers to realize their potential by exploring this exciting field.
Janosz employed his own decades of experience as an educator while creating the book.
“We used colorful, vibrant artwork and simple, effective language. Photos show children actively participating in the adventure of discovering next-generation technology,” he says. “Further, the iBook is filled with interactive graphics, videos, and a drawing scratchpad. It’s truly about exploration, not just teaching.”
‘Engineers Decide’ is available now and can be downloaded from the iBooks Store on an iPad or OSX Mavericks. The iBook is free through March 31, 2014 in 51 countries supported by iBooks.
To download the iBook, visit: http://tinyurl.com/engineersdecide
The trailer video for the book can be viewed here:
About the Author:
David A. Janosz, Jr. is an educator with eighteen years experience designing and delivering STEM education programs nationally and internationally with a focus on technology and engineering topics. He resides in Maywood, NJ, is married and a father of three young children.
Diana Chelaru provided original artwork to serve as the primary illustrations for Engineers Decide. Ms. Chelaru is an artist from Nyack, NY.
Teach Ingenuity Concepts LLC is a small business that focuses on publishing and consulting related to technology and engineering education and STEM for grade levels Pre-K through twelve.
Contact: David Janosz / dave@teachingenuity.com
By Dave Janosz, on February 5th, 2014 When a MakerBot 3D printer arrived in the Technology Education department in Northern Valley Regional High School in January, senior Matt had an instant resource for a project he is working on in his Theory of Production class. Matt is working on a prototype for a device intended to help young children learn to write their letters more carefully and neatly. In December he had sent some designs he created in Google Sketchup, a 3D CAD program, to Belgium to be 3D printed at a relatively low cost. But, when they arrived back in New Jersey the parts were incorrect. Now he can revise those designs and print them up in his own classroom in just an hour or two.
Another senior Jake was instantly intrigued by the new printer. Over a recent school break he had taken a trip to see a factory store where 3D printers are made and the resource also caught his eye when he visited the Mechnaical Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Within only a few days Jake was printing his ingenious idea: a plastic mold for a truffle lollipop for his foods class. Now he and others can draw their ideas in a 3D CAD program like Sketchup and have a physical piece printed up within a matter of minutes or hours.
The new 3D printers are now a valuable resource for all classes in the Technology Education department and are certain to help students connect with some cross-disciplinary project ideas. The printer takes a spool of ABS plastic filament and heats and extrudes it to a platform. The extruder is similar to the print head of an inkjet printer, but the platform slowly raises as the object is being built in order to allow for the thickness of the object to be built up little by little. Although it may take a part the size of a few cubic inches an hour or a few to be printed, it is still an excellent opportunity to be able to rapidly prototype a part for a design project to a printer of a relatively low cost.
By , on January 13th, 2014  Flickr Photo by Sam Jacoby Glass walls let the light in everywhere. What caught my eye was a series of small structures made of straws and tiny plastic connectors sitting on long white counters amid sleek computers monitors. Play, I thought…people here know how to play.
I had just walked into the M.I.T. Media Lab in Boston, where I could palpate disruptive technology, excitement and an exquisite open-endedness that was firing up my neural network. I glanced at the group of four teachers my America Achieves Teacher Fellowship had sent there and we all had the look of having stumbled into a candy factory. The 163,000 square feet around me had been created to be a literal laboratory fostering an anti-disciplinary culture that focuses on improving the human experience. Art, science, technology, and design converged in a place where Leonardo Da Vinci would feel at home in a dream.
For almost 30 years, the Media Lab has brought together inventors, artists and researchers to create for the future. The place is bursting with nanotechnology, data-visualizations, robots that express emotions, and work spaces where students and researchers can make gadgets they dream up at any time of the day or night.
Media Lab Director, Joi Ito, a major global thinker and advocate for the transformational power of technology, speaks of nine principles that will help us work in a future world of disruptive technologies. These principles emphasize resilience over strength, pull over push, risk over safety, systems over objects, compasses over maps, practice over theory, disobedience over compliance, emergence over authority, and learning over education.
What’s a teacher to do with all of this? Many teachers tend to like order, planning, and outcomes, but the virtual genie is already out of the bottle with a force that is shattering all known academic order like an anti-disciplinarian tsunami. Perceptive teachers know that all known territory is receding; yet the public demands that teachers become increasingly “effective” and accountable even as they are gripping onto the shards of life rafts from the last century and desperately trying to learn the habits of mind and skill sets needed for the future.
The truth, as I see it, is that we are all learning new navigation skills as we ride the waves together. Teachers, students and the people who organize and support schools will need to rely on a spirit of playfulness, courage, teamwork, insatiable curiosity, and new patterns of classroom flow that will be reflected in the way we organize time, space, and human efforts. We’ll need to ensure that students have the time they need to play while working on projects of their choosing, but still be supported by teachers, resources, and the sequential skills that school provides. We don’t have to sacrifice the nuts and bolts of learning; we just have to make sure that we allow our students to use them to create.
Early the next morning, the spirit of innovation I had witnessed at M.I.T. Media Lab found a home in my New Jersey classroom. My elementary school students and I brainstormed robots to become friends, help with tasks, protect them, or tell amazing stories. We talked about the limits and potential of artificial intelligence and what the world might look like when they grew up. As I watched my students playfully collaborate to design their perfect cyber-friend, I knew that the future was right here.
Maryann Woods-Murphy is the Gifted and Talented Specialist for Nutley Public Schools with thirty-five years of teaching experience. She is the New Jersey Teacher of the Year 2010, a Washington Teaching Ambassador Fellow 2011, and has served as an America Achieves Fellow since 2012.
By Dave Janosz, on August 4th, 2013  I wrote Engineers Decide because I want every young person to be able to envision himself or herself doing engineering. I know that most will not become engineers, but too many children never even see the possibility.
I originally wrote the book in 2008, which is about the time my oldest child was old enough to have picture books read to him. Immediately, I noticed a large disparity between the number of books that are available about people that work in a limited few professions such as firefighters, artists, and athletes, and those that were about more prevalent professions. At that time, I found no children’s books related to engineering, one of the world’s most popular professions. Since that time, thankfully, a few self-published titles have emerged, such as Engineering the ABC’s written by my friend Patty O’Brien Novak.
So, I set out and made dozens of notes about things that engineers do. I went on to note ideas that put those things into some context that I thought children could understand and relate to. For example, a thought about engineers that work on machines became a page about engineers that work on machines that make something that is fun and familiar to all children such as crayons.
Upon completing the original manuscript, I put a package together and sent a proposal to dozens of publishers. I received but one response to say that the idea had merit, but the book just wasn’t right for their company. Now that the book was nowhere other than in a few dozen publisher’s slush piles, I was more than discouraged. But, in January 2012 things started to look positive again when I learned of Apple’s release of free iBooks Author software. Since I have some background in design and page layout software, I figured I might be able to pull off self-publishing the title without having to put out over ten-thousand dollars to fund a print run. I was also very intrigued by the fact that the iBooks format offered interactive multimedia features.
I went ahead and contacted the artist that I had hired to do some drawings for my first publishing attempt, Diana Chelaru. Diana made the drawings into beautifully colored panels while I searched online stock photo and video databases for the multimedia elements. With a few hundred hours invested into the endeavor, my dream became reality when the iBook was released in the iBookstore on July 17, 2013.
Here is the original description:
Awaken the young engineer within your student or child! Ideal for ages five through ten, Engineers Decide explains that engineering isn’t about “things” but about individuals, inspired to bring forth the discoveries that will change our world. By instilling the joy of designing the future – whether as part of a team or working solo – Engineers Decide ignites children’s curiosity to the wonders of applying their imagination to meet fresh challenges. Engineers deciding upon solutions for product development, as well as all sorts of inventions familiar to children, are described simply and depicted with colorful artwork. And photos show children actively participating in the adventure of discovering next-generation technology. Filled with interactive graphics and videos, Engineers Decide stirs tomorrow’s engineers to realize their potential by exploring this exciting field.
Thus far, Engineers Decide is only available as an iBook for the iPad. Please use this link to download from the iBookstore.
If you represent a group of educators or an engineering professional society, I would be happy to work with you on a free promotional offer for your school or group. Please feel free to contact me at dave@teachingenuity.com with regard to that or any feedback you may have about the book.
By Dave Janosz, on March 16th, 2013 Cost: Free
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Grade Levels: 7-12
iPad App Link
The 123D Catch app developed by Autodesk demonstrates exciting new possibilities for tablets and smart phones. Use your camera to take 20-30 photos of an object from various angles and 360 degrees around and the app generates a 3D model of the object. Models can be exported and emailed as .3dp format. Although the app has a simple interface it takes some practice to take effective photos for models, so it may try the patience of younger children.
This would be greater fun with access to a 3D printer to actually print your models, but even without that it can help to provide an outstanding orientation to the exciting new world of 3D imaging and modeling. Just a few years ago software with this type of functionality cost upwards of thousands of dollars and required high end hardware. Now you can have it in your pocket and free!
By Dave Janosz, on October 19th, 2012 Cost: Free
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Grade Levels: 7-12
iPad App Link
The CAD Models app provides access to thousands of drawn and rendered parts from more than 300 catalogs of leading global manufacturers. The downloadable 3D CAD models are compliant with the most important international standards and are available for all current CAD systems, such as: CATIA®, Autodesk® Inventor®, SolidWorks®, Creo/trade; Parametric, NX™, AutoCAD®, Solid Edge®, etc. The preview within the app provides users to rotate 3D parts and zoom.
I see at least a couple of possible classroom applications. First, these files could be used as resources when introducing basic drawing techniques such as isometric and orthographic. A teacher could select a few interesting or challenging parts for students to view and try to draw using the techniques they are learning. Second, these standard parts could become a valuable library or resources for higher level design projects. Students could use a combination of this library of parts in conjunction with their CAD system to model more advanced systems.
By Dave Janosz, on October 19th, 2012 Cost: $1.99, Free Lite and HD Pro versions available
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Grade Levels: 4-12
iPad App Link
The Wind Tunnel app allows you to draw freeform shapes on screen and observe a simulation of how particles and smoke would move over and around the shape in a wind tunnel. This could be a great enhancement for lessons and activities that deal with flight as well as other transportation types of activities. Have students draw and test their designs and shapes in the Wind Tunnel app first before they build and test physical models. The free version will only give you a basic sense of what the app can do and how it works; it will not allow for the drawing of your own shapes.
By Dave Janosz, on March 25th, 2012 I fear that we’ve been seduced by the soothing voice and colorful telestrator technology at the highly popular Khan Academy website, which features thousands of videos on all topics math, science, economics, and others. I admit I do not understand the recent obsession with site, which has burst onto the educational and public scene over the past year or so, heralded as a great resource for all.
Before I get to the criticism, here are some things I do like:
- It’s VERY comprehensive; name nearly any topic and it’s covered.
- Sal has a nice voice.
- The explanations of concepts are VERY clear, though they lack much context for meaningful learning, which is where my criticism begins.
While a few of the sites videos are presented in a contemporary and meaningful context, most of the site’s videos lack contextual meaning to most young people. Take the math videos for example; a quick dive in and you find a bunch of letters, numbers, and lines on a board that lack context and meaning. Folks, you are looking at the same explanations that were made to you once upon a time in your high school algebra class, few if any of which you actually remember! If you didn’t RETAIN the information back then, why would you expect to retain it now? Because the lines, numbers, and letters are IN COLOR?
Along with the promotion of this resource I have also seen the concept of the “flipped classroom” presented. Okay, there’s some potential here. But unless you have a capable teacher that is able to make the in-class part of the learning motivating and meaningful to their students, Sal will likely have wasted his time.
I see that this might be a great resource for SOME teachers and SOME students, particularly those that are “self-motivated” high achievers. But, this is not for ALL students, and ALL is where it’s at in terms of where we need to focus our attention. Unfortunately, this resource will best serve the students that were already best served by great teachers and supportive families. This will do very little if anything to help the students and families that remain in the most need of help. It is highly unlikely that this itself will change things as much as the many lauding it say it will. In fact, it may cause a deeper divide rather than be a great equalizer.
There is little inherently meaningful or motivating in any of the Khan videos that I have viewed, which to me says that there will be zero learning. I have seen many audiences of educators hear the mention of the academy shake their heads in agreement that this is such a wonderful resource. That scares me. No one I know in education is taking a critical look at this in light of what research tells us about contextual meaning and motivation as they relate to learning.
Students need to find meaning and motivation in their learning experiences and I fear they won’t find them at the Khan Academy. Put the learning in context that means something to students. Let the students lead the way to the topics by selecting their own project work and we’ll be onto something in terms of motivation. Both are keys to educational success and to a student’s ingenuity.
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To kick off a new blog category that I will use to post rants about education in general, I’ll focus on one of my pet peeves about schools, which is what I like to call “Hallway Sitting Duty.” Walk into any school and you will find various professionals that are made to sit in the hall for any given period of time, usually to pester kids for their hall pass (which is another relic I’ll deal with at another time). Having done this for hours over my career, I can’t recall ever doing anything I’d consider to be critical while on hall duty.
