A Year in Learning at Elk Grove: Intro to Engineering Part 2

By Alexander Danan, Margi Patel, Ryan Libiano and Mark Heintz

This is part of a blog series intended to document and define learning at Elk Grove High School throughout the 2018-2019 school year in order to increase student learning, give professionals autonomy, increase trust in our learning community, and foster a sense of personal-intellectual collegiality within the building across departments. You can read all of the previous posts here.  I am going into each teacher's class four times and then they are reflecting alongside their students on the learning that took place and what they hope for. 


In this second visit to Patrick McGing's class, Patrick and his students reflected to see if what they had hoped for in my first visit came true.  It had been eight weeks since my first and it was great to see if they are living what they believe.  Even though it was only eight weeks ago, it's hard to stay vigilant on the goal. Read what each of them has to say.  The first entry in italics was what the teacher and student wanted to happen by this point, and the next questions get to what came true.

Patrick McGing

What do you hope to do for the next time?

At Elk Grove, the majority of teachers, including myself in Technology Education has adopted Standards Based Grading as the majority of the learning in our classrooms revolves around learning and developing essential skills (“Standards”). These essential skills sometimes get lost in “day to day school.” Therefore, part of my reasoning for having students create a resume and document their skills is so they know where they are starting the year off. As we continue the school year and cover more essential skills I would like to have students add to their resume; along with anything else that applies from school, extracurriculars, or other.

Students can then begin to see growth, even if they started with a very bare resume, personal growth will be documented.

On top of this, as one of District 214’s goals is career ready and we fall in a Career and Technical Educational course, developing resume building skills will further help students as they begin looking for careers that require the same skills they have developed in their CTE courses and others.


What aspects of your hopes came true?

It comes back to documentation. At this point in the year, we have now covered two essential skills that are the foundation of a lot of what we do in Introduction to Engineering Design. My goal with the resume building is for students to document their growth and learning and designating time to do that can be difficult. The aspect of emphasizing skill building has come true, but the documentation is an area that I will need to work on with students.

Alex Danan 

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

What I'm interested in is going through the design process to create some different but amazing things. I also want to learn more about how to use all the machines to make 2D into 3D. One of the biggest things that I hope I learn next time or later in the year is all the small things in that I'm able to do while designing program so I can make whatI'vee already made and make it better to the best of my potential.

What aspects of your hopes came true?

 One of the things that I was finally able to do in class was creating a different object while drawing, both in paper and on a creation software. We have also started to learn the different ways to draw out our ideas with different styles for different reasons. For some portion of time, everyone chose a career to learn about and make slides on, this way people could start choosing what they want to do in the future. but lastly in class after finishing our work I was able to make whatever my mind desired in a creation software, letting my mind be free.

Margi Patel

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

I hope to learn how to use the 3D printer and the new technology. By end of the semester, I would love to know what I should put it in my resume and cover letter. I'm a senior so I'm glad I took this class because I'm sure it's going to help me figure what I want to do after high school, specifically in engineering. I'm excited to learn more about the topics that we talked about. I'm also excited to see what interests me the most.

What aspects of your hopes came true? 

One of my favorite things we started doing is different types of designs and sketches. I also learned how to use the inventor after all the struggle.

Ryan Libiano

What do you hope to learn for the next time? 

Although we did not cover any engineering related topic in this lesson, I am still very excited to learn more about how to write a resume and cover letter and prepare myself for the future. Along with that, I am still very excited to dive deep into the engineering process and design my first object/thing (I don’t know what it is yet). Another huge hope is to finally use machinery such as the shop bot, CNC mill, Laser cutter, etc.

What aspects of your hopes came true?

We finally broke into the class and have learned important aspects of design: utilizing Inventor, understanding basic sketching types and using line conventions in our sketches. Another desire that was fulfilled was understanding how to prepare myself for the future and how to start a career.