If the Geometry in Construction curriculum had existed years ago, Jeff Schaefer would never have quit teaching.
Now, he’s back in the classroom — sort of. Every other day, Schaefer trades a textbook for a hammer and dry-erase markers for nails.
“I’m a big do-it-yourselfer, so this was right up my alley,” said Schaefer, a math teacher at Hendrickson High School in Pflugerville, Texas.
Hendrickson High School is one of more than 500 schools in the United States that currently offers a curriculum called Geometry in Construction, designed by the company Contextual Learning Concepts.
Students learn math by building a tiny home with tools and materials. The first year the school funds the project, and after that, the program is self-sustained by selling the homes.
In a typical classroom, students might be given a page of shapes and be asked to calculate the area of each shape. But in Geometry in Construction, math is applied to a real project in a real-life setting. For example, students might be given a blueprint with compound shapes, where they have to calculate the total square footage of carpet. Classes incorporate a variety of fields — electrical, carpeting, design, plumbing, siding, roofing. The construction of the house drives the order in which they learn each field.
“Kids get really hungry for being able to answer that age-old question in math of ‘When am I ever going to need to know how to use this?’” Burke said. Geometry in Construction provides an answer.
Geometry in Construction was first offered in 2006 by Scott Burke, an industrial technology teacher, and Tom Moore, a math teacher, at Loveland High School in Loveland, Colorado. A cohort of 80 students built a 640-square-foot home, which now sits in the mountains outside of Woodland Park, Colorado.
Since then, the curriculum has gained momentum. Currently, there isn’t a comprehensive study that shows whether the students have higher test scores compared to their peers in a regular class. But a small internal study within a few Colorado high schools showed these students had higher than average math scores.
Schaefer said he’s seeing similar results at Hendrickson High School.
In the typical classroom setting, he sees about 50 percent homework completion. “It’s like pulling teeth,” he said. But the way Geometry in Construction is taught, homework isn’t really optional. If students don’t turn in homework, they don’t get to work on the house. Homework completion, he estimates, has risen to 85 percent.
But success can be measured in more ways than just completion of homework or higher test scores. According to Schaefer, Geometry in Construction is also reaching students who sometimes have a hard time learning in a classroom environment.
“Some of them who really struggle at the pen and paper side of it, once we get to the real world, they’re incredible,” he said.
Geometry in Construction is also exposing students to trade skills — a sector with a dearth of workers in the U.S.
Seventy percent of construction companies are struggling to find qualified workers. And skilled trades, which includes welders, carpenters, electricians, mechanics and plumbers, have been the hardest to fill since 2010. And the jobs pay well. There are over 30 million jobs that pay an average of $55,000 a year and don’t require a bachelor’s degree.
Burke said the gap in trade jobs is a result of a push for college. It’s been ingrained in students to go to college after finishing high school.
Burke’s biggest challenge is showing parents that their students can be successful with or without a college degree.
“For some reason, we’ve almost demonized doing any kind of work with your hands,” said Burke. “As a teacher, one of the things we talk a lot about in training is that you can’t just be an educator of kids in this. You really have to be an educator of an entire community around what are the realities of the construction industry.”
Since launching the program at Loveland, 18 of Burke’s students went on to pursue careers in construction. Former students are now electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, framers and carpenters.
Geometry in Construction is meant to be self-sustaining, so the houses are sold to fund the next year’s program. But other schools have found partnerships with organizations, like Habitat for Humanity, to help fund and donate houses.
For example, at Glenbrook South High School, students built a home for LaTonya Stamps through Habitat for Humanity. At Hersey High School, students built homes for veterans struggling with homelessness.
Each teacher goes through a four-day training, which costs $1,695 per person. There, the teachers gain access to the math and construction curriculum, lesson plans and homework assignments. They also connect with a network of people teaching the same class. Burke says the price of this training is competitive to the cost of other curriculums where textbooks and licensing can skyrocket costs.
Since launching Geometry in Construction, Contextual Learning Concepts has also formed Amped on Algebra.
At Loveland, algebra had a 65 percent first-time fail rate.
In Amped on Algebra, instead of building a house, students build a business by selling T-shirts.
Algebra is one of the most commonly failed classes in high schools across the country. Some school districts experience a 74 percent fail rate.
“The thing is that Algebra 1, geometry, and even a little bit of Algebra 2 really are gatekeeper kinds of classes going into many different careers and into higher education,” Burke said.
And so Burke and Moore modeled their class similar to Geometry in Construction. And it worked, said Burke.
“The fact that these ninth grade kids understand a business model… is huge.”
Burke sees the hands-on model finding a home in every class. There’s potential for this to extend outside of math and into science, arts and English, he said.
“You see a different level of work ethic when you have a kid who is truly loving what they’re doing,” Schaefer said.
More: Fixing America’s Schools
Tag: high school students
For These Students, Gaming Isn’t a Way to Kill Time. It’s a Way to Success
It’s late one night when two teenagers — one an aloof perfectionist; the other, a troubled target of bullying — find themselves inhabiting the same strange dream. Though they’ve never met, the strangers share a heartbreaking connection: the recent death of a mutual friend. In their shared lucid dream, they walk under an indigo sky, trying to figure out where to go next while simultaneously coping with feelings of anger, sadness and fear after the loss of their friend. Soon, the teens encounter a giant lantern. It surges toward them, chasing them down a hallway and through a door.
It’s a nocturnal sequence that seems straight out of a mind-bending Charlie Kaufman movie. But the creator of this inventive world isn’t an established filmmaker; she’s Rebecca Taylor, herself a teenager living in the Bay Area. And the premise isn’t the plot of a blockbuster; it’s the basis for a video game about the stages of grief, called “Lucid,” that she’s helping develop. A high school senior, Taylor spends most weekends writing code with other young designers, storytellers and programmers at Gameheads, an Oakland-based nonprofit dedicated to training underserved youth the foundations of video-game design.
The yearlong curriculum, targeted to those between the ages of 15 and 24, seeks to open Silicon Valley’s enormous possibilities to low-income communities just across the San Francisco Bay, says Damon Packwood, the executive director of Gameheads. “The ubiquity of computing is akin to the printing press — it changes us culturally and permanently,” he says. “But if you have just one group of people that is part of that change, it doesn’t benefit us all.”
Packwood stumbled upon the model for Gameheads while he was teaching a web design class at another organization. To get his students interested in the subject matter, he suggested designing a website around gaming. But the students wanted to cut to the chase and learn how to build games themselves. “It’s a language they already understand,” Packwood says of the young people he mentors. Interactive storytelling, he adds, “is the medium of the 21st century.” By switching the focus of his class to video-game design, he found it was much easier to get kids excited about technology.
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That unique focus makes Gameheads, which currently serves about 60 students, the only tech boot camp of its kind in the Bay Area. While most other programs prioritize software development, an in-demand skill set to be sure, Packwood believes putting all the emphasis on what’s job-worthy is misplaced. Gameheads, on the other hand, is open to a wider range of roles, welcoming animators and sound engineers alongside programmers.
Since most of the Gameheads attendees are still in high school, Packwood says his main goal is seeing his students go to college. He has helped Taylor and the other students apply for financial aid, draft college essays and figure out where to enroll. (For her part, Taylor is readying applications to several schools in the University of California system and plans to study computer science once there.) And after they obtain their degree, about half of the grads consider joining the industry — a possibility many hadn’t considered before their time in Gameheads.
Taylor once suspected that because she didn’t have an “in,” she wouldn’t ever be considered as a serious job candidate by game studios. (One look at classic cult movies like “WarGames,” “Tron” and “The Last Starfighter” reveals why: White men predominate in the popular imagery of who creates electronic entertainment.) “I didn’t think it was possible,” says Taylor. But after working with Packwood and other mentors, who come from Sledgehammer, Ubisoft and other studios, her views changed. “I don’t really see it as much of a daunting task, only because a lot of my mentors are actually people of color who work in the game industry,” she says. “It seems very possible now.”
Just as Packwood had hoped — and predicted — the games being crafted by such a diverse population of young people defy genre. Teens like Taylor, whose gaming interests aren’t necessarily represented on Best Buy’s shelves, are more interested in playing “Life Is Strange,” an adventure about a high school girl who can rewind time, than first-person shooter games. “I think the industry has had enough of ‘Halo’ and ‘Call of Duty.’ They need something fresh and original, something that’s meaningful,” she says.
Taylor hopes “Lucid” is that type of game. By design, it necessitates two characters, so that one person can’t play it alone. The two players have to work through the grieving process together, like an interactive therapy. (When Packwood first heard the premise, he asked who gave the group the idea; it came from their own experiences, they told him.) “When I see friends of mine that are going through grief, they shut themselves out of the world. So why not have people try to get over it together?” Taylor asks. “I want people to know that games are more than just something you do when you’re bored. Games actually have the potential to save a life, maybe.”
Like Packwood and his cohort know, most successful game developers are the ones who can build new worlds. At Gameheads, he’s helping his students do just that: They’re carving out a space, both on their computers and in Silicon Valley.
Homepage photo of Gameheads participants courtesy of TJ Ransom
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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.