February 8, 2015
Greetings,
As we gear up for Innovation Week - coming the week of March 2 for our 5th and 6th grade students - here is an update of how we provide opportunities for creativity and collabor-ation all year long, in our regular curriculum.
We also share the news of our middle school "mathletes", who represented Swain yesterday at the regional MathCounts competition yesterday.
STEAM at Swain
by Julie Kibelbeck, with Deb Lindsay and Ellen Gerkens
The STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) program at Swain provides 6th, 7th and 8th grade students with hands-on experience in integrated problem solving. Our STEAM courses emphasize collaborative learning, science and technology content, and the engineering/design process.
Eighth graders spent the past semester 
building and programming Lego Mindstorms Robots. STEAM teachers Deb Lindsay,
Ellen Gerkens, and Julie Kibelbek have designed a series of challenges that introduce students to the basics of programming using Lego's graphical interface software. Working in pairs, students break challenges down into a series of building tasks and programming steps.
For example, to learn about sensors, 8th graders tackled the problem of navigating an obstacle course. Each pair of students designed a method for attaching an ultrasonic sensor to their robot, then programmed the robot to respond to environmental input using switch blocks.
Solving challenges in the STEAM program requires students to engage in the planning, testing, and revising that are essential to engineering process.
The course begins in 6th grade and is structured to give students a solid foundation in the skills they will need to complete a complex project at the end of their 8th grade experience.
For their final project, The Minesweeper Game, students were challenged to design, build, and program an original robot that could knock down as many targets as possible within an irregularly-shaped course. And their programs could run for only one minute!
Students rose to the challenge, putting to use 
their design and engineering skills to construct robots with features such as gears to increase speed or power, a light sensor to detect course boundaries, and/or a third motor to swing a cutting arm.
They also came up with a strategy for programming that would take into consideration their robot's speed and maneuverability.
Finally, in playing The Minesweeper Game, students learned firsthand that there may be many successful approaches to solving a given problem.
Ten students compete in MathCounts
by Grace Diggs
Yesterday a group of ten students from seventh and eighth grade represented Swain at this year's Lehigh Valley Regional MathCounts Competition, held at Springhouse Middle School.
Our team "Mathletes" were eighth graders Djamal Diakite, Nicole DaCosta, and William McKay, and seventh grader Aidan Reese. Our individual Mathletes included eighth grader Harry Rakos and seventh graders Jack Kehoe, Arnav Krishna, Dhruv Krishna, Hannah Starorypinski, and Noel Yacoub. Math teachers Grace Diggs and Lauren Kreitz were their coaches.
They all competed in the Sprint and Target rounds of competition, with over 200 students, representing 25 schools. The third round was just for the team members, and they worked well together, solving challenging problems. All our Mathletes put excellent effort into all the competitions, and enjoyed the experience.
For the first time, MathCounts announced only the top ten individuals and the top three team scores; while Swain was not in either group, Mrs. Diggs and Mrs. Kreitz said, "We are proud of our students' effort and accomplishments!"
