Folks:
The local second grade teachers were teaching the students about maps and how to use them. I came in and organized a 30-minute class on the challenge of designing maps for pilots. It was divided up into 15 minutes of showing them stuff with a projector and 15 minutes of them looking at sectional, WAC, TAC, helicopter, and IFR en-route charts at their tables.
In case pilot readers want to do something similar in their neighborhood schools, I’m sharing the materials that I used:
- speaker notes (shows what to talk about)
- slides (links to the sites required for the 15-minute lecture)
- handout (to teach kids that one should never give a talk without a handout; Edward Tufte’s rule! if you’re interested I can share this with you on Google Docs; the web version is pretty bad; if only I could get my hands on some of those Google Docs programmers for a few weeks!)
It seemed to be well-received by the students, but I was reminded of how unnatural it is for kids to sit and listen to a lecture. It is strange that we have organized so much of our educational system around something that kids won’t naturally do.
Related:
Maybe you should have taught them about basic maps while going on a treasure hut with them around their school in Cambridge. This gets them up and moving around and learning and working in groups.
I did this in Cub scouts when I was a kid over a weekend We read the maps in separate groups and decoded where the treasure was and then guided our group to find each point and a part of the treasure. We had fun and learned a lot.
Enjoy.
Thanks for the idea, Bill, but pilots usually get lost when on the ground!
Thank you for doing this.
I was briefly responsible for a science outreach program for elementary kids. I’d had a lot of experience teaching older students (physics and math) but it was a chastening experience working with elementary age kids. It made me appreciate the special skill and dedication that K-6 teachers bring to their work.
There’s very little lecture-mode teaching done in K-6, by the way. In general.
Thanks again for your public service.
You’re right in that absolutely no-one at Google is doing anything.
This is cool but try again when your child is in a high school. 🙂 May be I’m wrong but I don’t think elementary school kids are able to grasp the level of abstraction in navigation charts. Visualizing a three dimensional space encoded in colors, lines, and symbols on piece of flat paper requires a lot more processing power than is available to an average second grader!