I had fun today working with Lucas at the Belmont Media Center. We filmed an introductory test video to help Ascendly coaches prepare for their lessons.
This was our first real filming and I got to explain how to make an electronic greeting card.
STEM gift ideas from Melinda Gates
For those of us who are looking for last minute holiday gifts, we loved these ideas from Melinda Gates. It’s great to see so many people innovating products designed for young scientists. Just about every kid we know is a scientist at heart. (Don’t you have to be to figure out this world?) Finding toys and games that connect with these instincts is always a treat — for parents and kids alike.
Happy holidays!
Ascendly in Boston!
Ascendly has expanded to Massachusetts! We are excited to bring our great classes to students in the Boston metro area. Our first schools are in Belmont and we are eager to expand to other towns. Please contact us if you are interested in bringing Ascendly into your school and let us know if you have an interest in coaching.
Our presence in the Washington DC area continues to thrive as well. We are in about 50 schools in northern Virginia, southern Maryland and DC and continuing to expand.
Thanks to all the families and schools who welcome Ascendly classes and have made our growth possible!
JJ’s Never-Fail Chocolate Chip Cookies
I think I’ve made the perfect never-fail chocolate chip cookie recipe. This recipe, the culmination of a crazy amount of experimenting, makes about 8 cookies – basically a half batch. I think of this as my engineering experiment in the kitchen. I love chocolate chip cookies, and have made them many times over the year, and some were great, and others were just those awful cookie flavored pucks of disappointment. I wanted to make them right, every time. I was inspired by some stuff at The Food Lab, but I tried their recipe and it only sometimes worked. What? So I become obsessed with getting consistently good cookies. I did seemingly countless experiments. Every time I thought I had it, the next batch would, inevitably turn out disastrous. I started narrowing down the variables. Testing theories. Refining. It has come together here.
Last night, my wife tried to follow this recipe to make cookies for the last day of the new graduate class that she teaches. Watching her gave me a few insights. This is my holiday present to you.
Key Insights
So, why haven’t all of your cookies turned out perfectly in the past? If your experience is anything like mine, here is what makes for a consistent cookie:
- Bread Flour: A little bit stronger cookie that is more resistant to collapse
- Very soft butter so it is thoroughly mixed into the sugar without dissolving it: Butter pockets would otherwise melt and cause ‘blow-outs’
- Mellon Baller/Cookie Scooper – for consistent shape and volume: it was never reasonable to expect your rag-tag team of cookies to all need the same cooking times
- Pre-Chilling: ensures consistency between batches and makes sure none of them go in too warm. If they are too warm, they will melt and flatten out before the outer shell gets a chance to crisp and hold its shape.
- They are done when still moist, but not wet, and still very pale, just lightly browned around the extreme edges. You’ll need to experiment to find the right indications of doneness that works for you, but be prepared to differentiate between ‘still wet’, ‘moist’, and ‘dry’. This transition period takes place over the course of less than a minute, so stay on your toes. I’ve found that using a baller for consistent scoop size, and pre-chilling, leads to a pretty consistent cooking time between batches, so once you find the right time for your oven and your tastes, it should work every time.
Special Supplies
You’ll need a food scale and a cookie baller.
The Game Plan
We’ll mix up dry stuff, wet stuff, and the combine. We’ll then scoop out very uniform balls and put them onto the pan let them chill in the fridge while we wait for the oven to warm. You can clean up while everything to avoid any downers when the cookies come out.
Ingredients (This is half-size of a typical cookie recipe)
- 8 Tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
- 50g sugar (normal white granular sugar)
- 100g light brown sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 medium egg (about 53g)
- 165g bread flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 150g good chocolate chips
The Work
Mix everything by hand – please don’t use a mixer. The scale keeps things consistent regardless of humidity or flour compaction, and frankly it just makes life easier. If you don’t already use a scale, you love it and you’ll start to wonder why all recipes don’t use weights. The baller keeps your cookie balls consistent. Consistency is a big deal here, you could also use a very small ice cream scoop -whatever – just make them all the same. However, once you have a good baller, you’ll wonder how you ever made cookies before. Well – you just made random cookies – some good and some bad. For consistently good cookies, try to use something that will give you a consistent ball.
Start off by preheating the over to 350 but keep in mind that we’ll refrigerate the batter for at least 30 minutes, so just plan accordingly.
Now, get started on the wet ingredients… add into a medium bowl
- Butter, softened
- Soft enough that you easily mix it into the sugar, but not so soft that the sugar dissolves.
- If you accidentally melt some of the butter, try throwing all of the butter into the freezing for a bit until it firms back up.
- I usually cut the cube into little chunks and nuke it for a few second and stir everything together.
- If the butter is a bit too hard, keep stirring until it softens. The big thing to avoid is little butter chunks that will later cause cookie blow-outs, like a mini volcano.
- white sugar
- 100g light brown sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Stir these together until thoroughly mixed, paying extra attention to not leave any chunks of pure butter and to not dissolve the sugar. Keep mashing those butter chunks down if you see them.
- Egg
- Mix the egg into the butter and sugar mixture
So, let’s start on our dry ingredients… in a smallish bowl, combine these dry ingredients
- bread flour
- baking soda
- salt
Now, combine about half of this dry flour mixture into the wet mixture. Mix it by hand – just barely mixing enough to combine almost all of the flour. We really want to minimize the mixing here to avoid over working the gluten in the flour.
- chocolate chips
- plus the 2nd half of the dry ingredients.
Continue mixing by hand until most of it is combined. When in doubt, it is better to under-mix than to over mix – we don’t want that gluten to get overworked.
Place cookies on the tray – use a medium-sized mellon baller for consistent results. Avoid putting too many on there at a time and keeping them away from the edges – maybe about 7 cookies to a tray. Your scoops should be about the size of half a golf-ball.
I like a bigger cookie, and so I use a bigger baller. You can user a smaller baller, of course, but expect them to cook for less time.
Now, importantly, put the cookie sheet(s) with the scooped balls into the refrigerator for about a half hour. If you only have one cookie tray, then scoop any extra balls onto a plate. There really isn’t any need to cover the cookies here, unless your refrigerator is full of, say, stinky fish. Now is a good time to clean up your mess and give a ball or two to any junior helpers.
Cook for about 12 minutes at 350, or 15 at 325. If it looks wet, they still need to cook. After it no longer has any wet spots (moist is ok, wet will mean the cookie will collapse), then you can take them out immediately – or leave them in for another minute or two for a browner, drier, cookie. To each is own, here. When using a smaller baller, I had to adjust to 13 minutes at 325. Importantly, don’t overcook them. I find they’ll still look fairly pale in the oven when I take them out but still lightly browned at the edges. It might just be the yellowish light in my oven, but they looked undercooked until I got them out on the counter.
I really find the true test of doneness is the moist, but no-longer-wet look. This totally means you’ll need to stare at your cookies and first identify the still-wet look. They are worth obsessing over. Remember, it goes like this:
- Batter
- Still-wet
- no-longer-wet <— about a 30 second window – pay attention!
- over-cooked
- Family disappointment and quiet, but firm, judgment of you and your worth in the kitchen. Frantic searches for Mrs. Fields
On the bright side, even though this seem obsessive, I find my times are quite reliable for subsequent batches, at least for my oven and scoop sizes. You’ll need to find your own times.
After they are removed from the over, set the cookie tray on a rack for 2 minutes, then remove the cookies from the tray to the rack.
For best bliss, dunk into a cinnamon infused whipped cream.
Tools teachers can use to communicate with parents
I’ve been researching ways to let Ascendly coaches more easily communicate with parents. Although Ascendly tries to send out email before each lesson to go over the day’s plans, I’d love to make it even easier for coaches and parents to communicate. This page is a list of resources I’ve found and mainly a place for me to track what is out there, and to maybe help somebody else.
- Remind101 is a free way for teachers to safely and cheaply (it’s free) send text messages to parents. At the time of this writing, they announce they were in 30K schools – which is just crazy.
- Pros:
- Everyone’s phone numbers stay private, so kids won’t call you at home
- People can choose to get emails instead of texts
- A complete log of message
- Free
- Cons
- No way for central office to monitor or review messages (can this be right?).
- Just one way communications – students/parents can’t respond
- Celly is like Remind101, but students can respond
- Pros
- Back and forth communication
- Text, email, and web
- Cons
- Might be deadpooled / not maintained
- Set up a class Facebook page
- If you Tweet, consider mirroring your tweets onto your Facebook page.
- MommaZoo
Smartphone-only based solutions:
- Dash is an iPhone app to track basic student performance and, most importantly, remind you to call parents:
- Class Messenger
Update:
Edshelf has the definitive collection of Group Communication EdTech tools. Go there!
Electrical Engineering and the Kindergartner
So, for the first time, I attempted to introduce Kindergartners to Electrical Engineering (EE). These Kindergartners go to school with my daughter, Maddie, at the excellent Waynewood ES, just south of Washington, DC. Now, to be fair, we just started with the basics, but I had been looking forward to seeing if this age, as a group, could get anything out of EE, or if, we’d instead just have a shared exercise in frustration. I had already exposed Maddie to some of the core EE concepts and she was able to grasp them, but I happen to think she is exceptionally bright (no bias here), and more importantly, she gets exposed to this stuff all the time. So how would this group of kids, so young, respond to their first dose of EE? I had about 50 minutes with them to find out.
How do you get young kids to do grown-up engineering? Firstly, don’t think of them as short grown-ups. They are pretty smart, but very ignorant about how the world works, so you’re starting with a blank canvas. Most Kindergartners don’t understand atoms, let alone electrons, so start easy and don’t overcomplicate things. I’m reminded of some advice I got shortly before my son was born. I read that you should answer every question your kid will ask, but the wisdom comes from knowing what to leave out. Be accurate, and precise, but don’t loose them.
- Kindergartner question: Why is the sky blue?
- Worst Answer (it’s wrong): We’re seeing a reflection off the oceans.
- Bad Answer (it helps nobody): Leave me alone.
- Better Answer (accurate, but overwhelming): Photons from the Sun travel along different wave lengths, some of which are more highly absorbed and/or refracted. Blue becomes the predominant color to reach our eyes.
- Sort of good, but not helpful answer (Socratic, but not informative): Why do _you_ think it’s blue?
- Best answer (accurate, and at the right level): It has to do with how light from the Sun goes through the air. It’s pretty, isn’t it?
When I teach the full Electrical Engineering class to the older students, I’ve found that real foundational concept that we need to get across is to understand circuits: what one is, when will they work, what is keeping it from working? Although we touch upon the theory of electricity, I haven’t found the concept very helpful in, say, debugging why your bristle bot won’t work. We need the theory of circuits – at the grade school level.
I use a story something like this, all the while demonstrating with a live setup:
So, the electric current starts here at the positive terminal, or where the plus sign is. Now, Mr. Current wants to go out for a walk and return back home. He goes out the front door, the positive side, and has to return through the backdoor, the negative side. Mr. Current goes along down the wire, which is kind of like a road for him, and he’s always looking around for the easiest back to his home. Since Mr. Current is just out for a nice walk, he doesn’t does not want to any work while he is out, he just wants to enjoy his stroll. If he has to do some work in order to get back home, he will, but only if he doesn’t have any choice. As Electrical Engineers, we want Mr. Current to do some work for us, like making our LED light up, so we’ll arrange the roads, or wires, so that the only way for him to get home is for him to go through our LED which he’ll light up as he passes through. Our LED is like a bridge, where at the middle of the bridge, in order to pass, you have push your way through a big door which lights up our LED. The door is really heavy and hard to push for somebody that was just out for a nice walk. If Mr. Current can find a short cut home without pushing that heavy, he’ll take it. Our job it to make the only way home to be through our LED bridge, doing the work need to light up the bulbs.
The highlight of my day was when one of the grownups said that my story even helped her better understand how electricity and circuits work.
I gave the kids conductive play dough. I call it Lightning Dough, which makes up a Squishy Circuit. This gives a viscereal medium to work with and get the kids out of the metal-wire mindset. Squishy Circuits are just really fun – a great way to start.
The biggest challenges involved handling such a large group, 24 kids, and doing so much in just 50 minutes. As expected, several kids didn’t get the initial concept and they just need a little one-on-one time, which is hard with group size and time constraints. When I do it next time, I’ll better prepare the other adults on how they can help groups of kids work their problems, further distributing the work load.
By the end of class everybody got their circuits working. A bunch of them needed help, and they undoubtedly need to practice more, but they weren’t totally baffled by the process. Having two extra adults was quite helpful letting us reach all 24 kids before the end of class. At this point, the kids probably have more questions than answers, but once again, I’m gathering even more evidence that these kids can do amazing things if us adults can just give them the opportunity.
I’m always fascinated about what concerns kids. Today, I warned the kids not to wipe their eyes after playing with the play dough, since it might make their eyes sting. This fascinated many, and terrified others. One poor boy, whose eyes were apparently suffering from allergies, was over anticipating the horrors of play dough in the eyes – he bravely fought back the tears. Others wanted to discuss elaborate scenarios of when it might be OK to wipe their eyes even after the Lightning Dough been handed out:
Concerned girl: Coach JJ, what if I have the play dough but my hands are still clean and I really have to wipe my eyes. Could I have I lift my safety glasses and wipe them?
Me: [Pausing for patience] – Ok everybody, just don’t wipe your eyes!
If you’d like your kids to get experience Electrical Engineering (any grade) – I can recommend a few options:
- If you live in the DC metro area, and would like a free Introduction to Electrical Engineering (any grade) at your school, just use the Contact Us form and we’ll work something out.
The Art of Making Mistakes
JJ and I were teaching a class last week to K-2 graders on building bridges. While we had showed them some techniques, a lot of the kids, especially the younger ones, had some trouble building the part of the bridge that is suspended in the air.
It is not immediately obvious, I admit, to figure out how to get a bunch of 2×2 and 2×4 blocks to form a span between two columns on either side. Many kids were inclined to build the span off the end of one of the (not so steady) columns, working their way across, carefully interweaving the 2×4 bricks. (It turns out no matter how many times you show them how to build it on the ground first, some kids just really want to build it in the air. More fun, I guess.)
Building a bridge up in the air is really hard so it wasn’t surprising to the grown-ups in the room when the bridge the kids had been steadfastly working on suddenly crumpled when the column broke in half or when the span came off the column at the top. Even those who had followed our suggestions of building it on the ground first, sometimes struggled to get the bridge attached without crumbling their columns.
I watched the reaction of the kids when their creations faltered under the pressure of attaching new bricks at precarious angles or from pushing too hard on the bridge span at an odd angle when it wasn’t lined up properly. Crack. Thud. All their work was now sitting in front of them in pieces. Some kids picked it up and started over again. A fair number however, got visibly frustrated. Some cried. Other blurted out, “I can’t do this!” or “This is never gonna work!” JJ or I (usually JJ, because he’s much better at this than I am) would go and sit with them and encourage them to try and figure out what went wrong and help them find a way to make it work.
It occurred to me that these types of engineering classes are a great place to teach kids about making mistakes and learning from them, which I regard as a critical skill in developing curious and productive young minds. In a culture such as ours where everyone is a winner and well-meaning parents do everything they can to keep their kids from experiencing disappointment, we may be inadvertently creating kids that are afraid of messing up, lack resilience and don’t have the psychological tools to learn from their mistakes. (For more an interesting take on this, see this recent article in Psychology Today.)
And yet, to be an innovator, to be creative and to invent new ideas and approaches that will have an impact on society when they are adults, kids today need to learn the art of learning from their mistakes. And you can’t learn from mistakes unless you have the opportunity to make mistakes in a safe environment where the downside is limited and someone or something can help you figure out where you went wrong. It seems like we have an opportunity in Ascendly and other STEM projects to create this type of environment, which is another reason why this whole endeavor is so enormously worthwhile.
Summer Camp 2013
I’m thrilled to announce my new Engineering and Technology camp in Old Town Alexandria, VA, from 5 – 9 August 2013. Downtown Baptist Church has graciously approached us to work with them at their great facilities in Old Town. The full-day camp (with morning and afternoon half-day options) will provide a combination of Junior Structural Engineering using LEGO bricks, Electrical Engineering, and Robotic Engineering classes, plus long-term projects, inspiring videos, and, if we’re lucky, some guest presentations. I’m so excited I can barely sit still.
Frankly, this is going to be an awesome week pulling together a combination of instruction, long-term projects, and fun activities.
Junior Structural Engineering using LEGO bricks
Electrical Engineering – Lightning Dough, Snap Circuits, and Solderless Breadboards
Robotic Engineering w/ LEGO NXT
Long Term Week-Long Projects
Campers will also work long-term projects throughout the week.
[Old Details Deleted]
Building With Planks
I’ve been very happy using LEGO bricks for the Jr. Structural Engineering class, but I’m not wedded to LEGO. I just want to the kids to get good at engineering, so I’m more than happy to use whatever they think is awesome, and then adopting the curriculum to make the most of the materials at hand. So I’ve had my eyes open for the next building block.
Kapla Planks
A few years, friends of the family introduced us to Kapla planks and I also happened to see their US store in Charleston, SC. They are pretty amazing and a fun alternative to LEGO. They are wooden planks that have 1x3x5 dimensions. There are a couple of clever aspects to them. Firstly, the dimensions are such that you can stack three planks together to match the width of one on-edge plank, and five plank widths equal three lengths, both of which help your stacks to eventually converge. Also, some gravity, friction, leverage, and precision manufacturing, make them stackable without using any type of fastening mechanism. All in all, they make great open-ended building toys.
I’ve since learned that, not surprisingly, there are a few competitors in the field. Keva makes blocks that are distributed exclusively through Mindware. Like Kapla, they also offer some complimentary toys for building more complicated contraptions and they are headquartered in Virginia, not so far from me. I also stumbled upon Citiblocs, which offers the same basic block with city-themed marketing pitch. They are, I think, down in Tampa, FL, where I spent Christmas this last year, but I didn’t realize the overlap in time to manage a face-to-face meeting.
We’ll see how things come together for the next class. I haven’t had good hands-on time, yet, with each of the blocks, so I speak to their differences. I’m looking forward, though, towards some awesome building time around the house as I work up to the first class.
Building Olivia’s Inventor’s Workshop.mov
My daughter and I build a LEGO Friends kit – Olivia’s Workshop. The robot runs away.
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