Students on TV

 MPX students shared about some of their transportation/sustainability projects  for online television called Think Tech Hawaii. I love it when we are doing authentic work in the classroom and it draws the attention of people focused on real-world issues! You can't get much more authentic than the gridlock in Honolulu.

Way to go Shane, Kailee, Kendall and Mahina for your awesome talents with public speaking!

Field Trip to Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii (JCCH)

This might have been my favorite day all year. We walked, which made me proud of my students who are used to field trips on buses, and were greeted warmly at the JCCH.

I forwarded the student's research questions ahead of time ( http://padlet.com/wall/sfqz4f17x5lb) and Lloyd and his team of volunteers were able to put together INCREDIBLE primary and secondary resources, organized in piles with the students names on top. 

I was most touched that the students, after analyzing primary and secondary sources all year, understood the incredible value of the materials they had access too. They took pictures like crazy with their phones. Aaron said, "I wish we had had resources like this for the civil war unit." I told him we would have to move to the east coast for that. 

Freedom and film

Short film "Ghost Bike" is one of the films produced by Justin, Brianne, and Cami for our unit on Transportation. I developed this curriculum during Kupu Hou Academy, 2014, a summer professional development opportunity for teachers at Mid-Pacific Institute.

Because this project required students to work outside of school and coordinate their own schedules, students were able to choose their teams, choose their content, choose their roles (actor, editor, writer). My only requirement was that they had to include examples in the videos of the 20 English elements we are studying (motif, theme, symbolism etc.).

"Skate in the Moment" by Hooper, Payton, Luke, and Cameron was selected for the film competition at our school!

Studying electricity on HECO field trip

MPX10 students visited the HECO Wailua power plant this week to learn about how energy is made on the island. The students researched the HECO website and what critics of HECO are saying online to prepare their questions before the field trip.The questions were fantastic! At one point the PR representative asked if anyone else felt it was hot in the room and his coworker said "no it's just the quality of the questions you're getting!" Here's a sampling:

"If 90% of the electricity in Hawaii is fueled by sludge oil, is it really worth it to own an electric car here?"

"What does HECO doing to move away from a dependency on fossil fuels?"

"What is HECO doing to stabilize electricity prices on the island?"


"Is it better to have PV installed on the roofs of individual houses or create large scale PV farms?"

It felt like we were on the field trip with a bunch of college kids!

Girls strike a pose in their steel-toed boots. Boys pull the stoic look. 

Visits from Bikeshare Hawaii

This week our MPX class was honored to receive a visit from Bikeshare Hawaii!  COO Ben Trevino and CEO Lori McCarney (whose son is a Mid-Pacific alumni!) fielded student questions about the bikes and allowed students to take a ride.

While these bikes are not electric like the bikes MPX students are building in their STEM class, they are part of a city wide program to ease mobility. Students will be integrating the bikeshare bikes into their short films on transportation.

Get your stencil on!

MPX10 students are hard at work preparing for the upcoming exhibition "Civil War Silhouettes." They started with research of an invention during the civil war with their partner and wrote an argumentative paper about how this invention affected the war and continued to affect the world today. 

Next, after the field trip to the art museum, they created drafts of how they could express their thesis  through art. Then they teamed up with a visit from the advanced drawing class to get feedback on their drafts and refined them.

Once their design was approved it was time to start going big with their silhouettes in the style of Kara Walker, a modern artist we studied. 

Communication through art

This week in MPX10 our class visited the Spalding House museum on Tantalus mountain to see their exhibit "HI Society" in which local artists express the different elements (financial, cultural, spiritual) of living in the islands. Students received personalized tourists from docents in which they peppered the docents with questions and then did a hands-onart activity. The knowledge gleaned from this field trip will help inform their artistic decisions on their Civil War art project.