SMES Partnership With Level Up Village for Global Classroom Featured in PC Mag – Read the Story and See the Photos!

The global inventors course, which is being taught at St. Margaret’s by grade 5 teacher David Beshk, is featured in PCMag as a cutting-edge example of global education and technology in action.
St. Margaret’s has entered a new partnership with Level Up Village to provide global STEM-enrichment courses that promote one-to-one collaboration on real-world problems with students around the globe.

The partnership supports St. Margaret’s strategic plan efforts to place an emphasis toward STEM, innovation, global studies and using technology to create connections outside the classroom. And already, it’s beginning to make headlines.

Level Up’s global inventors course, which is being taught at St. Margaret’s by grade 5 teacher David Beshk, is featured in PCMag as a cutting-edge example of global education and technology in action.

The new, yet already popular after-school club for grades 4 and 5 students meets each Tuesday and participates in video-based engineering brainstorms with students in Honduras, with a mission to design and build a product that helps solve a global issue. For the first session, the lack of power in rural areas of Honduras inspired a project to develop and build a solar-powered flashlight. Students at St. Margaret’s and students in Honduras shared their flashlight designs through TinkerCAD, a web-based 3D design and 3D printing portal.

In addition, students at each school also created question-and-answer videos on their experiences that are shared with the students at the other school.

PCMag hailed the course as a “fitting endorsement that the global classroom has arrived” while noting its ability to connect classrooms and share state-of-the-art tools.

In addition to the global inventors course taught by Mr. Beshk, two Level Up courses for kindergarten through grade 2 students are taught by kindergarten teacher Colleen Beshk. The global sound artists course explores the science of sound, with students building musical instruments and working with a partner school in India to understand and appreciate culturally diverse music. Another course, global storybook engineers, partnered with a class in Nicaragua to read stories from India, Italy and Brazil and then engineer a solution to a problem in each story.

“For one story, the students engineered a shell protector for a turtle,” Mrs. Beshk said. “To simulate the turtle shell, students built the protector around eggs and then tested their builds by dropping them from the second floor of the gym.”

Level Up Village sessions will continue throughout the school year, and STEM-enrichment courses are planned for Summer at St. Margaret’s 2017 as well.

To read the PCMag story on St. Margaret’s partnership with Level Up Village, click here
Back
 
Translation? ¿Traducción? 翻译?:

An Independent Preschool Through Grade 12 College-Preparatory Day School in Orange County California

Non-Discrimination Policy
St. Margaret's Episcopal School does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, religion, sexual orientation or national and ethnic origin in the administration of its educational, admission, financial aid, hiring and athletic policies or in other school-administered programs.