Sept 21-25 in MPX 10

This week was really fun! In MPX10 Humanities students put the finishing touches on their plays about revolutions. We practiced several acting techniques to get ready for our big performance for the 5th grade on October 5th. 

This week in our combined humanities/STEM class we spent one day in which the student teams presented on safety tips for our power tools before going to the "bat cage" to start cutting our metal. Each team is building a book shelf to be used by the library or elementary school and is learning how to weld in the process! These skills will come in handy when we are building our electric bicycles. 

Friday was a field trip to KVIBE bike shop in kalihi where students worked with their semester long teams to work on the bike they will race in our final competition. 

As always: follow @davislauradavis for more live photos of our class!

Final Presentation of Learning: MPX Marketplace

The MPX10 Marketplace was a huge success!
Thank you so much to all the parents, faculty and administrators who came out to judge the student's final work. Because of you, the students were able to showcase their final projects to an authentic audience.

Thanks to Minju who put together this overview of the event:

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.