Smithtown High School East physics teacher Gillian Winters (pictured on right) has been very busy the last few months. She has been collaborating with a Northport School District physics teacher on designing a new physics lesson for elementary science students!
The lesson was designed to encourage students to understand how the properties of matter affect how an object functions. The second graders were tasked to design a "shoe" for gripping uphill or for sliding downhill. Each group was challenged to first design their shoe in a detailed diagram, collaborate to engineer a shoe and ultimately test the effectiveness of their shoe on a ramp with varied steepness.
Winters, who has taught at High School East for 17 years, is an emeritus teacher in the New York State Master Teacher Program.
She says she hopes to bring this project to a 2nd grade classroom in Smithtown next year.
"It's important because of the new national and NY State new science standards. Karen and I have the knowledge behind the physics-based standards and we thought we could help the elementary school teachers."
