Mr. McMahon

When I first arrived at my current school, the PTA had, one year before, purchased a 3D printer. Unfortunately, there was no plan for how to implement it, and it had gone entirely unused for its first year. Upon learning about it, I immediately asked if I could bring it up to my classroom. Within a week, the students in our class learned about how it functions, and we began experimenting on TinkerCAD. That same year I developed a project with students that integrated 3D printing with our study of volume in rectangular prisms and our study of scale in math. We first built the "Holy Llama of Volume" out of boxes, and then developed scaled versions in CAD to print and display. The Holy Llama became a classroom celebrity who would re-emerge every year at the onset of our volume unit.

As somebody who fell in love with computer science in high school (and, especially, the ability to create embedded in it), I urgently wanted to teach my 4th and 5th grade students the basic logic structures long before SFUSD had adopted a plan to bring computer science curriculum to our schools. I began by teaching students "computer thinking" using offline activities. Students learned how to follow directions like a computer, and then how to give them. From there, we moved on to projects in Scratch focused on conditionals, loops, and variables. After that, I was happy to develop projects with whatever tools we had available: Raspberry Pi printer servers, Arduino robots, and more.

In my second year of teaching 5th grade, I reworked the experimental design unit to allow students to pick a testable question (focused on testing whether one variable had an effect on another), design an experiment, execute that experiment, and then present their findings to an audience. It began that first year as just a science fair in our classroom that families and other classes were invited to. Throughout the years, I was able to expand it into an event that spanned the whole 4th and 5th grade, and took center stage at a new "Math and Science Night" that became a community event.

I often felt that moving through the engineering design process was missing from the science curriculum that students used. So, I developed and ran an engineering design unit with my students. They learned the design process, and worked in small teams to tackle engineering challengers for our "Tinyton" citizens including building paper towers, catapults, ziplines, and more.

Reworking the US and California History curricula was my first undertaking in my first year of teaching. I wanted to make sure the study of history allowed for experiential learning, connected students with writing projects and hands-on projects, and, most importantly, prompted them to think about the diverse perspectives and human experiences throughout the events that we covered. By the end of the first year, students had taken part in a mock trial of Anne Hutchinson, redone the Constitutional convention, built and updated maps representing California's shift from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural economy, wrote journals reflecting their experiences in a TTRPG inspired version of the American Revolution, and much more.

My love of project based learning and design thinking isn't limited to just the STEM subjects. I believe it is a way of thinking that enhances students' abilities in all subjects, which is why I've brought these ideas to everything I teach: creating instruments that can manipulate sound waves enough to play "Hot Cross Buns", programming CYOA stories in writing, creating podcasts to evaluate readings, building a trading card game involving the characters from our read alouds that year, programming games to practice simple math skills, etc. Curriculum design is my passion and I love being able to take students along in the learning experience.