AOLME 2014

MEC Program Description:

The Spring 2014 Mathematics Engineering Club (MEC) was an after school program implemented at a bilingual middle school in the South West. During this time, Neritza Diaz-Cruz joined the research team. Neritza is a doctoral student in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies. Her research work focused on teaching strategies that facilitators in the program used during the implementation of the curriculum.
MEC was twelve sessions long. Students and facilitators worked on the AOLME project for 90 minutes every Tuesday afternoon. The curriculum included seven topics that were available in both Spanish and English versions. The curriculum included an introduction to digital image processing and the use of still black and white (binary), and color images and video. Similarly to the 2013 ME-S2 program, students worked with the Raspberry Pi as computing platform and used Python as a programming environment. The successful bilingual teaching of digital color video processing at the middle school level expanded the innovation started in the 2013 ME-S2 program.
During MEC 2014, students programmed color digital videos from the pixel level. Students developed conceptual understanding of programming through their projects. Here are some samples of the videos that students created.

2014 MEC Program Flyer:

STUDENT WORK



Pictures


The pictures above show groups of students working on their final projects. After having planned their videos, students used both laptops and Raspberry Pis to distribute the work and maximize their productivity.

Students presented their final projects to their relatives and friends during the graduation ceremony.



Videos


Group Aztecas:
Group Challengers:
Group Destructors:
Group Eagles:

Students from Polk Middle School, who participated in the MEC program of the AOLME Project, programmed the digital color videos included below. Students themselves designed and chose the themes for each video.