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REVVED UP BY SUE De PASQUALE
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EEP IN THE SUBTERRANEAN SPACE beneath the Upper School Library, surrounded by bicycle frames, engine parts, wrenches and screwdrivers, Upper School faculty members Ramsay Barnes and Shelly Watts have spent the last year hammering out the details for a new course they’ll be soon be offering: “Automotive Physics.” Their elective, open to juniors and seniors, will give students hands-on experience in assembling an engine, which the teens will ultimately use to motorize a bicycle. “I’ve never built an engine, so I’ve learned a lot of new skills while developing the course,” says Watts, a physics teacher. Adds Barnes, an art teacher, “For the School to invest time, money and space and basically take a risk on this course, is very gratifying for me as a teacher. It makes me want to be better at what I’m doing.” The idea for the course started with Barnes, who joined the Art Department faculty three years ago after teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). A longtime Vespa enthusiast, Barnes launched a student club to restore and rebuild the vintage scooters — a club that became wildly popular. Barnes found that Friends students really enjoy having the opportunity to “work on engines and get their hands dirty” solving mechanical challenges. Then last spring came a call for Friends faculty to collaborate across departments and across divisions to develop new courses and approaches to teaching through the Summer Curriculum Grant program. When Barnes approached Watts with his idea for the
course, she immediately saw opportunities to incorporate the study of physics principles such as velocity and aerodynamics. The duo submitted their proposal, and it was one of 24 initiatives that received funding last summer. Once they got the green light, Barnes and Watts began to develop the curriculum and structure for the course. “We coordinated our free blocks so that we Physics teacher Shelly Watts and art teacher Ramsay Barnes. could meet twice each cycle,” says Watts. Ultimately they decided that the hands-on course would have students working in pairs over the course of a semester to connect a motorized two-stroke engine to a manual bike. The class will include daily journaling (“to reflect on what did you accomplish today? What went wrong? What’s the next step?” says Barnes), visiting lecturers and a primer on bike safety (since the ultimate goal is to have the students tooling around campus on their motorized bikes). The two faculty members also plan to capitalize on the School’s new 1:1 iPad Initiative by incorporating instructional video clips into the curriculum and by documenting student progress throughout the semester to create a video “construction log” for each student pair. The teachers anticipate that their students will hit plenty of roadblocks along the way — and that’s actually part of their plan. “This won’t be a ‘cookbook lab,’” says Watts. “The students will experience frustration [when things don’t work as planned], but these setbacks will really build their critical thinking skills — and prepare them well for conducting research in college.” FS
Students restore a vintage Vespa.
FRIENDS SCHOOL |
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