In my 30 years teaching I’ve gotten 48 grants in 24 years totaling just under $371,000. In the last 22 years straight I’ve gotten at least one grant per year every year. That’s quite the streak and the Ocean Guardian Schools project is one of those grant opportunities that I can apply for year after year for a number of years before it’s over. It is because of amazing grant opportunities like this that I get to not only take kids outdoors to do field science work but I also get to purchase and provide my students with amazing tools for data collection and for learning! I have enough Vernier Labquest 2 sensor interface devices for classes of up to 30 students with enough sensors to have teams collect dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH, turbidity, conductivity, and flow rate readings where every student gets to have his or her hand on either a sensor or the Labquest 2!
Over the years I’ve also been able to purchase waders for the kids who get into the creek, digital scopes to see and photograph the benthic macroinvertebrates in our creek, shovels, gloves, and ponchos for tree planting and weed pulling plus have money for field trips off campus! I’ve also been able to add 3D printing to my classroom activities (I will have four 3D printers total very soon) along with being able to record 360 degree VR videos and take thermal infrared images with a FLIR camera! Grants are amazing!
I looked up some of the more popular 3D Printers and after reading multiple reviews decided that it’s best to stick to what I’ve got. I’ve been using one Qidi X-One 3D Printer for years and it has been great. It has been quite easy to use and for someone who has never done any 3D work much less printing, I was able to hit the ground running and get started rather quickly. I did take a workshop at our northwest computing conference, NCCE, where I learned to create 3D objects on Windows 10’s 3D Builder and it was all I needed to get my students started on designing their own parts to use on their robotics projects.
After reading reviews on other 3D Printers what clinched it for me to stay with Qidi is the fact that negative reviews for most of the printers I looked at were because of poor support and customer service. My X-One ran smoothly and I was able to print lots of 3D objects but it wasn’t without technical difficulties. Every single problem I had I was able to solve either by going to the Qidi Facebook group or getting excellent support from Qidi in China. They would send me videos showing what to do to get my printer back up and running any time I emailed them asking for help. Two summers ago, my printer had a problem that was proving difficult to fix and the Qidi tech support young lady that I was working with ended up sending me replacement parts with videos showing me how to replace them until we got that printer up and working again! With the time difference it would take an entire day between Qidi responding over night, then me trying out the fix during the day and writing back during the day until they could write back to me over night!
For $450 a piece I plan on getting the Qidi X-Pro:
So I’m looking forward to adding three more Qidi 3D Printers, the X-Pros, to my class and making it easier for more of my students to design solutions to projects we work on by being able to print four jobs at a time!
Two years ago I got my first Donor’s Choose project fully funded adding that to my repertoire of ways to get projects funded. This year I am able to add another way to get projects funded, and frankly this was for a project I didn’t even know I had a chance of incorporating much less funding, winning a contest that gives prize money! This past spring Epic Games and Unreal Engine hosted a Teach with Interactive 3D Contest for teachers. They were looking for teachers to create and develop lessons plans for teaching content to students using Unreal Engine and/or Fortnite Creative. I had taken a course learning how to play on and use Fortnite Creative and I was hooked. Fortnite Creative reminded me of the freedom you get when using Minecraft on creative mode. It’s what we call a sandbox environment meaning that you can create anything you want with limitless materials. On Fortnite Creative, unlike Minecraft, the world and materials are realistic, which is why it appealed to me. Plus, on Fortnite Creative there are tons of ready-made materials and dwellings so that I don’t have to make things myself from scratch. I’m not that artistic nor do I have the patience to build things bit by bit for hours on end.
Also very cool is that there are lesson plans created by teachers to using Fortnite Creative with students for different subject areas and more coming! Here are the ready-made lesson plans using Fortnite Creative ready for downloading and using. The contest seemed too cool to pass up and we had until September so I figured I’d put something together over the summer. Putting together lesson plans is difficult for me so I put something together a bit at at time and finally got what I thought was an okay lesson just before school started. From my experience with grants, submitting proposals is better than not because most people do not take the time to submit proposals so those who do stand a better chance of getting a grant. With this contest I was hoping to pull in one of the 10 honorable mentions for $500 because I figured there were not going to be too many of us submitting a lesson plan.
Time went by and I forgot about the contest. A few weeks ago I came across something that reminded me of the contest and I searched and found nothing. I was sure I didn’t even get an honorable mention because, at least with some grants, if you don’t hear anything long after the deadline passed that probably meant that you didn’t get the grant. Most at least send you an email saying that your project didn’t get funded but some don’t. Then the week before winter break I get this email saying that I won some money. I almost deleted it thinking it was one of those email money scams but when I actually read it I saw that it was from the Epic Games people about the Teaching with Interactive 3D contest! I won and placed and I got second place! I couldn’t believe it!
After seeing how Fortnite Creative worked and upset that on Minecraft gravity doesn’t work like gravity does in real life, I designed an activity where students would test out different objects to find what objects respond to gravity like objects do in real life. Then, using those objects, students can design and run their own physics experiments!
Here’s a short video I made introducing my lesson plan:
Turns out that second place comes with a $5,000 prize and they will work with me to get my lesson plan finalized so they can add it to their collection of plans (update: here is my lesson plan live on their site)! I couldn’t believe it! The prize money ends up being split up $3500 going to my school and $1500 going to me. After getting 48 grants totaling almost $371,000 this is the first time ever that some of the money goes to me! I certainly couldn’t believe my luck there! After some major dancing and hooping it up I got the email to sign for my $1500. When I made sure my principal signed for the school’s $3500 I started to think of what I could spend it on. The Ocean Guardian Schools grant has me covered on all things Science and since this prize money was won using a game I immediately thought about adding to my esports program!
I turned to Twitter and asked for ideas from the many amazing esports people that I follow. They are real experts and doing things that are amazing! Based on their input and working with my jr and sr high esports coach I’m going to get to Nintendo Switches with extra controllers and monitors where I can have eight kids playing at once! Our jr and sr high school esports program has kids playing Smash Bros Ultimate and Mario Kart on the Switch so I’ll be getting those for kids to play. That still left enough money to go another route so decided to get some Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets to have kids try their hands at VR games! There are games we can play together in multiplayer mode and even competitively! Again I went to Twitter and the VR experts gave me lots of great ideas for games and even programs kids can use for Science!
I figure I can buy five Quest 2’s along with the following games and programs:
- Beat Saber (for esports)
- Echo Arena (for esports)
- Sculpt VR
- Gravity Lab
- Tilt Brush
- Multiverse
- Mission ISS
- Puppet Fever
- Ecosphere
I’m so excited and am looking forward to incorporating more amazing things into my programs. A lot of what we can do with the Switches and the Quest 2’s will be easier and better done once vaccinations get to us here and once we are able to safely work in close proximity. It might be awhile so we’ll see what we can do when can at least get back to our hybrid model schedule.
Have a great New Year’s Eve Day and Happy New Year! Yay for 2021!!
