At the Needham School Committee meeting last night, the Needham Education Foundation (NEF) announced the recipients of three grants totaling $30,782 in the spring grant cycle. One of the grants represents the second year of a two-year grant in which educators from High Rock, Pollard, and Needham High School participate in a three-day professional development workshop on Project Based Learning (PBL). PBL is at the forefront of educational methods that harnesses the teaching, development, and practice of the Portrait of a Needham Graduate competencies. This summer, like last summer, 35 teachers will design, manage, and assess a project for use in their own classrooms. One staff member will also attend coaching training, allowing them to coach and support the 70 NPS teachers trained in PBL methods.
Awarded grants also include:
- Cardio-fitness equipment, including two treadmills, two recumbent bikes, two elliptical machines, and two suspension trainers, will transform the existing Pollard weight room into a fully functional fitness center. The fitness center would allow the school to create new, engaging fitness units for 7th and 8th graders that address all five components of fitness: body composition, cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, and flexibility.
- Sixteen new Finch 2.0 robots will allow Needham High School students to program and interact with a physical device giving them the ability to see their coding come to life. The robots can be programmed in Java (Mac/PC), Python (Mac/PC/Chromebook), and block-based languages (Mac/PC/Chromebook) and will be used by computer programming and robotics students.