The Engineering by Design class is a full-year elective, which introduces students to engineering and technical skills. In the class, students practice their technical skills through creating different structural pieces and designing demos on computers.
Everywhere in the world, towering structures surround us, each a stunning piece of work. But in order for such structures to arise, engineers with inventive minds are necessary to devise and construct them. The Engineering by Design elective introduces the basics of engineering to students and provides an opportunity to develop their engineering skills. The class combines hands-on learning with a technical education for students to engage in problem solving, idea development and collaboration to make a final product.
The Engineering by Design class is a full-year elective taught by engineering teacher Aubrey Love. Students design and create different structural pieces, including designing demos on computers, building structures using cardboard, 3D printing and digital art.
Sophomore Theodore Tsekov said because of the way the class is structured, it is an in-depth experience that provides a space for students to be imaginative and try alternative ways of thinking than in a standard academic class.
“In other classes, you’ll be learning about how to design things, whereas in the [Engineering by Design class], you get to physically design them and go through all the steps of designing something,” Tsekov said.
The class’s most recent project was a series of catapults that they designed, built and tested. The catapults were used to give an introduction to the course as, while the mechanism is simple, the trial and error, revisions and the countless problems people overcome are not. Love said the catapults were a success but getting to that point was a challenging process.
“The catapult project involves multiple goals that vary in difficulty and importance. Designers need to weigh the pros and cons when trying to meet each criterion. Teams are looking to design a device that can launch an egg as far as possible. They are looking to reduce the size of the device as much as possible,” Love said.
Sophomore Anna Lawson said the class teaches completely different skills than what she thought she would learn in school.
“[The class] combines [subjects] like math and engineering with designing and building. I really like this class because I feel like I’m learning things, but I also get the freedom to make each project my own,” Lawson said.
Love said one of the hardest parts of the elective is generating ideas and creating actual plans, but that this is part of the learning process.
“I hope students will embrace iteration and within that, failure as impetus and valuable data for another attempt. I hope students will value skill building as a necessary step in the pursuit of a goal,” Love said. “I hope students seek collaboration and, moreover, diverse collaborative environments, as they recognize the benefit of differing opinions, experiences and methods.”
Engineering Innovation & Design is a popular elective providing a student-centered, project-based curriculum that challenges students to interpret real-world engineering and design problems. Mr. Aubrey Love has been involved with this class, and building the Engineering elective pathway, for over fifteen years. Read more about this on our Programs page and in the BHS Course Catalog.
Q: How has the course evolved since its inception?
AL: It started off purely as an Engineering course but we realized that there was a need for students to learn about collaborative problem solving so we also now offer a new course called “Engineering, Innovation & Design.”
Q: So how does the new course differ from a traditional engineering course?
AL: Well, we encourage students to use empathy when problem solving and ask themselves: “who is benefiting from this?” and “how will the user feel?” In other words, they are being asked to apply unique perspectives to problem solving and also think about form and function. We want students to experience a real world collaborative endeavor.
Q: How do you get students to problem solve from a variety of lenses?
AL: We have students from all different pathways who bring unique, multidisciplinary perspectives to the table. Having a problem looked at from the lens of an art or English student is invaluable and the students learn from each other.
Q: So this course isn’t just for students who are strong in science or math?
AL: No, in fact, we encourage students with different skill sets to join the course but we do ask that students come with confidence and are strong in one area of study. This way, they know they have something to contribute to the course and believe their voice will be heard.
Q: What would former students say about your course?
AL: I have had former pupils tell me how they have been able to apply what they learned on the course to all aspects of life. Even an English major told me that they apply the processes they learned here, all the time, both in their academic life and in the real world.
In 2019, BHS launched Experiential Physics, a three-year pilot program to develop a new curriculum for 9th grade Physics, supported by a grant from the BHS Innovation Fund. The redesigned course develops scientific, engineering, and entrepreneurial skills and teaches students collaborative, real-world approaches to designing solutions to today’s scientific problems. We caught up with three physics teachers, Julia Mangan, Jennifer Spencer, and Stacy Kissel, who shared their views on the new Experiential Physics course curriculum and teaching approach. Their collective insights are captured in the Q&A below.
Q: Why was it important to redesign the physics curriculum?
State standards and practices now call for an increased focus on the skills students develop in 9th grade physics. As a result, we were inspired to reimagine learning in 9th grade physics to be more applicable to physics in the real world! Our approach has become less teacher-driven and more student-focused. We attended two intensive training seminars to learn more about the Modeling Approach to teaching physics and how to teach students to work together collaboratively, take risks, and communicate productively.
Students will participate in a variety of projects, activities and labs to give them a broad sense of what it means to “do” science—this emphasis was missing from our previous curriculum. We are developing the “story of physics” through multiple lenses including student learning through content, skills development, and the many different “hats” students wear throughout the year.
Q: What are some of the new ways you are covering physics material?
We wanted students to learn physics through doing and not just learning facts, placing greater value on the process of science. We’re spending more time teaching students more explicitly how to ask questions like scientists do and how to answer them right in the classroom. We’ve added more hands-on experiments in which students test hypotheses and carry out procedures, analysis of data, and online research.
We have created and piloted a new project across the 9th grade asking students to apply content learned in the waves unit (sound, light, etc.) to explain how organisms use waves to communicate and sense the world around them. Students can take a deeper dive into how the content connects to the real world, both with how human ears and eyes work as well as how other organisms have evolved different ways to use sound waves and light waves for sensing and communication.
We will also be doing a unit on nuclear physics at the end of the year. This is a topic we have not previously taught to freshmen.
Q: How does the new curriculum impact the experience of students?
The goals for student learning are to push beyond learning about science and to focus on learning how to do science. This involves many skills that scientists employ, such as learning how to ask good questions, using discussion skills to make good predictions, designing experiments that answer their questions, using research tools to see what other researchers have learned, and creating mathematical and computational models that describe the real world for the purpose of answering questions.
We’ve received informal feedback from students that they love learning this way! We are regularly hearing students refer back to the common experience of each unit as they make new connections that push their understanding deeper.
Our activities and projects are designed to better meet the needs of all students regardless of background knowledge. For example, students who typically aren’t engaged in the learning of science, but loved tinkering with circuits, spent time creating a complicated device that worked in unique and challenging ways.
Q: What have you learned in the first few months teaching the new curriculum?
It has been so exciting to have the time and opportunity to be creative in defining this shift in science instruction!
We’re still trying to cover the same breadth of physics material but deeper learning requires more time for students to both learn and practice the skills of a scientist. Students seem excited to apply their knowledge through in-depth projects (so far, building a complex working circuit and researching an organism’s ability to create and use sound/light waves).
Rolling out a new curriculum has pushed us to collaborate more closely across our 9th grade physics teachers to create a more consistent experience for students. We’re creating a central place and strategy for documenting the what, the how, and the collective wisdom of the physics department. We have managed to capture most of what teachers are doing in their classrooms and, in year 2, we will evaluate and refine this documentation.
Q: How will the BHS expansion with updated classrooms and the new STEM wing support this course?
The new classrooms will be larger and more effectively designed than the previous ones at BHS. Desk seating will be in the middle of the room and tall lab tables will be located around the perimeter. Separate instruction and lab work areas will allow students to set up and leave long-term experiments, or exploratory stations, out and accessible in the classroom for longer periods of time. This will provide students with more opportunities to explore something in the beginning at the surface level, and then go back to it throughout the unit as they learn more and are able to ask deeper questions.
Students in Social Justice Leadership took a field trip to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, a medium security prison alongside Project Youth, a program run by MCI-Norfolk.
From HBO’s “Oz” to Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black ” to Fox’s “Prison Break,” seemingly, cinematic depictions of prison culture are more omnipresent than ever, feeding viewers images of the “typical” inmate: dispassionate, belligerent and remorseless. Yet, several students have sought to redress the narrative, hoping to understand inmates beyond these supposedly hostile facades.
Students from the C and G-block sections of the Social Justice Leadership class visited the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk (MCI-Norfolk), a medium security prison, on Thursday, Jan. 19 and Friday, Jan. 20, respectively. The trip, which takes place annually, was organized in accordance with Project Youth, a program run by MCI-Norfolk that allows inmates to share their experiences in prison with Massachusetts students.
History teacher Kate Leslie, who teaches Social Justice Leadership, said a strength of Project Youth’s is its ability to humanize inmates rather than exploit their stories to inhibit others from committing similar crimes.
“What makes Project Youth special is that it is not a ‘scared straight’ program in which the goal is to freak kids out and ensure that they never do drugs or drink and drive,” Leslie said. “[The program] is about helping students understand the humanity of incarcerated people, their decisions and the underlying factors, whether they be poverty or drug addiction or a history of sexual assault, that contributed to them breaking the law.”
Leslie said many of the stories told by the inmates correspond to the history and concepts explored in the Social Justice Leadership class.
“I teach my students about mass-incarceration and the ways in which the prison population has ballooned since the 1980s, especially due to the “Tough on Crime” movement and the policing of drug use. All of that tends to come up in the inmates’ stories,” Leslie said. “When they discuss why they are in prison, some of them talk about drug addiction, some talk about dealing [drugs] and others talk about receiving sentences that they felt were longer than they deserved.”
Following their visit to the prison, students were taken to the Brookline Teen Center, where they formed groups and reflected on the stories they heard. Senior Alex Levy said one story in particular felt powerfully resonant. It was told by an inmate named Ian, who recounted a night during which he operated a vehicle while heavily under the influence and killed a man.
“Ian grew up middle class and spent his summers vacationing in Cape Cod, like many students in Brookline,” Levy said. “He revealed his alcoholic tendencies but explained that he never thought of himself as an ‘alcoholic,’ as he drank beers every day, not hard liquor. He said something that especially stood out to me: ‘I thought of myself as a good drunk driver.’ Although this is counterintuitive to me, I hear many of my peers saying things like this quite frequently.”
Junior Malcolm Urena said the trip changed his perspective concerning inmates and their decisions.
“When I learned about the trip, I thought that the people in the prisons were there because they deserved it,” Urena said. “But after hearing their stories, it was hard to say that these people deserved to be in prison. They seemed to be normal people who had made a mistake that ruined their lives.”
Levy said the inmates she met were dissimilar from the stereotypical traits assigned to them in popular media.
“Hollywood tends to depict inmates as tattooed people in orange jumpsuits and shackles. It also portrays incarcerated people as cold and thick-skinned. These men, however, showed a great amount of remorse and were very vulnerable while telling their story,” Levy said. “One man even started tearing up as he recalled seeing his niece, whose life he hasn’t been able to be a part of while in prison.”
Leslie said hearing inmates’ stories highlighted the often overlooked structural flaws of the country’s criminal justice system.
“I’ve seen, in the past, that students have a sense that this country is failing to create a [criminal justice] system that rehabilitates. Sometimes, we say that the prison system is meant not only to punish people, but also to help them reform their lives and learn from their mistakes,” Leslie said. “However, when students hear these inmates talk about what prison is like, they don’t hear about that rehabilitative aspect. Instead, they might hear about how inmates cannot get time with a social worker or that they have not been able to address an underlying addiction.”
Junior Eli Traub said the trip’s immersive nature gave him knowledge and opportunities that he would not have otherwise achieved.
“I think this trip is so important because of the experience-based learning. I learned more in this trip than I did over my class’s entire prison unit, not from a lack of information during the unit, but from the value of experiencing things for myself,” Traub said. “No fact or statistic about the prison system can truly give you a grasp of what it’s actually like, and by listening to men who have spent years there, I was able to learn firsthand about the injustices and systemic issues in the prison system. Only through knowing this through experience will anyone be able to make meaningful change.”
The School Curriculum Subcommittee met to discuss the implementation of future classes for the 2022-3 school year.
The Brookline School Curriculum Subcommittee Meeting convened virtually via Zoom on Jan. 18 at 4 p.m. to discuss the introduction of new courses and adaptation of current courses for the 2022-23 school year to improve diversity and access at the high school.
Mathematics Curriculum Coordinator Joshua Paris presented a proposal for a new course at the high school: Data Science and Social Justice, which would focus on social justice issues and introduce students to gathering related data, making models and presenting.
Paris said the aim of the course is to tie math into real-world application, something that students have expressed an interest in.
“A number of teachers have incorporated social justice lessons into their curriculums this year, and the feedback we are getting from students is really positive,” Paris said.
Paris said the course will be open to all students and taught using complex instruction, a type of teaching that focuses on group work and collaboration.
“Complex instruction is a way to make sure that all students have a social standing in a class. It’s a belief that all students have something to bring to a group,” Paris said.
Visual Arts Curriculum Coordinator Donna Sartanowicz presented a new visual arts course called Artists’ Books and Visual Journals. Sartanowicz said the course focuses on expression through creating visual journals which can provide students with an outlet for expression.
“A visual journal is a place where you can practice, you can collect images and think about things. You can experiment with your ideas, and it’s a very open way to work,” Sartanowicz said.
Sartanowicz said she found low enrollment numbers and course success from underprivileged communities after looking at data from other visual arts courses.
“We need to do some work on building the diversity of our classes. We want to make sure we are teaching all students; we are making a variety of moves to bring that diversity and equity about, and [the course] is just one of those moves,” Sartanowicz said.
Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator Gary Shiffman presented the concept of a pilot Social Studies class, Global Studies, for the 2022-23 school year as a 10th grade world history course.
Currently, all students in 9th grade take the unleveled World History: Identity, Status, and Power (WHISP) course and choose from either standard or honors World History II for 10th grade. Like WHISP, Global Studies would have students taking both standard and honors credits.
Global Studies would revolve around themes, and Shiffman said that although this can lead to confusion around the timeline of events, it allows for students to form personal connections with class content and understand impacts on the present day.
“In a thematic-based course, you can get to the present and teach the past as a precursor in a way that is illuminating that past for students,” Shiffman said.
According to Shiffman, the Global Studies course would allow differentiation within a class to be based on performance instead of pre-determined labels.
“Traditionally, students sign up for an honors or standard class and there is no way to make it not feel like identification. The fact is you’re buying a ticket, and you buy the premium ticket or the not premium ticket” Shiffman said.
Science Curriculum Coordinator Ed Wiser updated the subcommittee on the process of making AP Physics courses more accessible to students by merging two AP Physics: AP Physics I & II and AP Physics C. Wiser said additional planning is required for the start of the merged AP Physics course next fall.
“We’re trying to figure out how we can restructure those first few units of AP Physics so that we can make the onboarding a little more intentional,” Wiser said.
Students and teachers benefit from consolidating courses with multiple levels in the high school, Wiser said.
“Every single time that we’ve taken courses with many levels, as soon as we’ve collapsed those, scores were the same or even better, and access was increased,” Wiser said. “Every single time we’ve reduced the number of levels, we’ve always seen success, and the other interesting part of this is that you get teachers who are able to collaborate more.”
The subcommittee plans on voting on the proposed courses at their next meeting on Feb. 3.
Anisa Sharma and Nate Parry Luff | January 20, 2022
The Data Science and Social Justice class works to apply mathematical ideas to social justice issues students are passionate about.
As an algebra class discusses taking the standard deviation of a data set, just down the hall, the Data Science and Social Justice class is using a data set to find the intersection between math and global issues.
Taught by math teachers Danielle Thiessen, Danielle Rabina and Christopher Monschauer, the Data Science and Social Justice class was created after the teachers sent a grant proposal to the Innovation Fund. Theissen, Rabina and Monschauer hoped that this course would allow for students to apply mathematical theories to topics they are passionate about.
Thiessen said the idea was derived partly because most math courses offered are more theoretical.
“Because data science ties into the world around us so much, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity for the math department to cover a course on social justice. Every other course has a class on social justice and we didn’t, and it was really hard to tie social justice into the algebra curriculum,” Theissen said.
Senior Dylan Krakowski said they were drawn to the class after learning it intertwines two topics they are passionate about.
“I didn’t want to take just a ‘normal’ math class. I really like using math in real world scenarios, and I also pursue social justice in the real world—I try to live my life in a way that benefits humanity. So I was like, ‘kill two birds with one stone,’ and take the class,” Krakowski said.
Rabina said class is spent working on various projects that will eventually teach students how to complete the data science cycle. According to Rabina, the last step of the cycle is for the researcher to share their work- the backbone of the course,
“The data science cycle encompasses what a data scientist would need to do to complete a project. You start with asking the questions, then you gather data and then you might go back and fix your questions based on the data you see. Once you have your data, you have to learn how to take this huge amount of data and analyze it,” Rabina said. “Then, you create some way to communicate what you found to the world around you.”
The class’s first unit will culminate in a project that centers around gun violence during the summer months in Boston. The idea for this project was born after Thiessen, who lives in Boston, noticed an uptick in violence this past summer. At the end of the project, students in the class will analyze the patterns established through the data, and ultimately will make recommendations to the Police Commissioner of Boston based on these patterns.
Rabina said the data science cycle is helpful to analyze local events.
“We were talking about what happened, and thinking about how we could involve it in the curriculum and what factors may have led to this increase in gun violence. This is actually part of the data science cycle: noticing things in your world and asking a question about it, then gathering data, then drilling it down to a clear idea. We thought this could be our first project, and that’s how it was born,” Rabina said.
Prior to this major project, students are completing smaller projects in which they learn different skills pertaining to data science. Krakowski said one of the highlights of these projects has been that it is up to the students to decide which direction they want to take them.
“Students have a really big voice in the class, which is one of the ways in which they’re intertwining social justice into their curriculum. They’re allowing a lot of student power and student decisions to choose to work on something which we are passionate about,” Krakowski said.
Thiessen said one of the key qualities of the course is that there are no prerequisites; the class is open to all students.
“I recommend this class to any student who is coming out of standard, honors or advanced,” Thiessen said. “Any student who wants to learn more about statistics and data science from a more hands-on experience and is eager to learn about social justice. We built this class wanting it to be for everyone.”
Ava Varrell, Sports Managing Editor|October 21, 2022
