I have loved writing my new lesson plans. They are not lesson plans I would normally think to write, which is really exciting. I am really excited about being able to incorporate healthcare and animals into my engineering curriculum.  The one thing that I am concerned about is having the time in the curriculum to implement these new lessons.

One of the best parts of these lessons is that both lessons bring professionals into the classroom. The dog lesson will bring in a dog handler and the rescue dog, so that students can present their designs to the handler. I have also found someone willing to bring chickens into the classroom so that my students can study the movement of the chickens.  Any time I can expose my students to new things in life, I feel like I have succeeded.

I am still struggling a bit with creating the assessments for both of these lessons. Any suggestions will be welcome.

I am so excited about all that I have learned during my externship because most of it I can take back to my class. One of the greatest things that I have gained from this externship is the all the wonderful contacts I have made at NC State (plus of course the other teachers I have been working with). Plus, I now have amazing access to different materials at NC State and wonderful ideas for field trips to the university, and even better professors and graduate students who are willing to host my  students.

JeVar and I are going to try and set up a competition with Dr. McCord for a global One Health Challenge for middle school and high school students to participate in and that will be judged by professors, graduate and undergraduate students at NC State. We are hoping to develop a competition where students will design a product/solution to a global health challenge.

I have developed two great lessons that will expose my students to integrating healthcare and nanotechnology into the design process. Both lessons will involve animals and hopefully I can actually bring the animals into the classroom to inspire the students even further.  I am incredibly excited because Dr. Jur is getting two 3D printers to rotate between our participating schools. My students design incredible projects, but it would be so amazing if they could actually print a model of these projects.

I always try to design lessons that are relevant to the real world and that work to solve the Grand Challenges of Engineering, but I have constantly struggled with how to incorporate healthcare concepts into the curriculum since that is not my background. This program has been wonderful at helping me both learn more about healthcare and developing ideas about how to incorporate these concepts into my lessons. I can’t wait to bring all of this back to my classroom!!!

I have learned so many neat new technologies that I am really excited to implement, but there are definitively some drawbacks.  There are lots of phone apps that are really neat and I would love to use in my class, but many of them run into the problem of first do all students have a phone and since I teach middle school that is not usually the case. I have also run into the case that some of these apps can only be found on a particular platform and not on another.  Also, teaching technology, we constantly run into glitches, like the district server is down for the class, or three of the class computers are running updates. These are all problems that can be overcome, but it does make it more difficult to implement at times.

Working with nanopaint on glass.