Hasta La Gadget!

3D printing can be used to create all sorts of weird and wonderful things, whether it be a complete office to a fully functional motorcycle, it all seems to be possible. This is why it doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that students at the University of California San Diego have managed to create and launch a rocket that uses a 3D printed engine.

The surprising part of it is that these students actually managed to beat the likes of NASA to the punch. Apparently they are the first university group to have successfully achieve launch with their design. The rocket itself is dubbed the Vulcan-1 and measures 19 feet long, 8-inches in diameter, and is capable of a 750 pound thrust.

It is also powered by a cryogen combination of liquid oxygen and refine kerosene. NASA has been attempting to build 3D printed rocket engines in the past but like we said, it seems that these students have managed to beat them to it. It has also been reported that private space companies have also been trying to create rockets with 3D printed parts.

That being said while not exactly a rocket, the European Space Agency have recently tried 3D printing satellite parts which helps to reduce the cost of production and the time it takes to manufacture them. In any case if you are curious, you can check out the rocket’s launch in the video above.

Students Launch A Rocket With A 3D Printed Engine , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

A couple of days ago thanks to details provided by famous leakster Evan Blass, details about the upcoming OnePlus 3 was leaked. Now Blass has in the past been pretty spot on with his rumors which is why chances of what he posted is probably true, but if you are still skeptical (and rightfully so), here’s some confirmation for you.

Thanks to a sighting of the handset on China’s version of the FCC, TENAA, photos of the upcoming handset and its specs have been confirmed. It was initially speculated that the design of the OnePlus 3 was fake in order to throw us off our game, but the TENAA sighting seems to confirm that they are the real deal.

The listing also confirms its specs which includes a Snapdragon 820 chipset with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of onboard storage (which apparently will be the base storage, or so we hear), a 16MP rear-facing camera, an 8MP front-facing camera, a 3,000mAh battery, and a 5.5-inch Full HD display, which is rather unfortunate since we were hoping for QHD at least.

No word on the version of Android but presumably it will come with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, although the last leak hinted that OnePlus was already testing Android N for the handset. In any case the phone could be launched on the 14th of June, so check back with us then for the official details.

OnePlus 3 Spotted At TENAA, Has Its Specs Confirmed , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

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In the far western part of Mongolia, the tradition of hunting with eagles continues to pass from generation to generation. The Kazakhs, who live in this harsh, cold region, rely on their trained golden eagles for hunting bright red foxes in the winter. As the eagles roam the skies, they easily spot the foxes below to bring as prizes to the hunters.

Only around 250 eagle hunters remain, yet they preserve their tradition by teaching their children the practice from an early age.

Watch the HuffPost RYOT video on eagle hunting above.

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Columbia University Professor Celia Oyler posted online a critique of the 4th grade English-Language Arts PARCC exam written by an anonymous fourth grade teacher. In the critique the teacher quoted from specific questions that were on the test.

Then the firestorm hit.

PARCC Inc., citing copyright law and confidentiality agreements, has been stalking the Internet and twitter to get the questions taken down. PARCC also demanded that Oyler identify the offending teacher, which she refuses to do. The teacher, in the post, makes clear that he or she was aware of the legal ramifications of these actions, but felt compelled to inform parents and the general the public how “the high-stakes accountability system has deformed teaching and warped learning in many public schools across the United States.”

Why are testing companies so anxious to keep this analysis from parents and the general public? If the anonymous teacher is correct, and I believe he or she is, testing companies do not want us to know that Common Core and its high-stakes testing regime are a disaster that do a grave disservice to this nation’s children.

As of May 26, 2016 the full posting by Olyer was available on the blogsite of New York Public School Parents which is managed by educational activist Leonie Haimson. Haimson urged education bloggers to distribute the report widely. However, to avoid legal issues, this post reprints the teacher’s critique of the PARCC exam, but deletes the copyrighted questions and “prompts.”

The post begins:

I will not reveal my district or my role due to the intense legal ramifications for exercising my Constitutional First Amendment rights in a public forum. I was compelled to sign a security form that stated I would not be “Revealing or discussing passages or test items with anyone, including students and school staff, through verbal exchange, email, social media, or any other form of communication” as this would be considered a “Security Breach.” In response to this demand, I can only ask–whom are we protecting?

There are layers of not-so-subtle issues that need to be aired as a result of national and state testing policies that are dominating children’s lives in America. As any well prepared educator knows, curriculum planning and teaching requires knowing how you will assess your students and planning backwards from that knowledge. If teachers are unable to examine and discuss the summative assessment for their students, how can they plan their instruction? Yet, that very question assumes that this test is something worth planning for. The fact is that schools that try to plan their curriculum exclusively to prepare students for this test are ignoring the body of educational research that tells us how children learn, and how to create developmentally appropriate activities to engage students in the act of learning. This article will attempt to provide evidence for these claims as a snapshot of what is happening as a result of current policies.

The teacher argues the “PARCC test is developmentally inappropriate.”

The PARCC, which is supposedly a test of the Common Core State Standards, appears to have taken liberties with regard to grade level texts. For example, on the Spring 2016 PARCC for 4th Graders, students were expected to read an excerpt from xxx. According to Scholastic, this text is at an interest level for Grades 9-12, and at a 7th Grade reading level. The Lexile measure is 1020L, which is most often found in texts that are written for middle school, and according to Scholastic’s own conversion chart would be equivalent to a 6th grade benchmark around W, X, or Y (using the same Fountas and Pinnell scale).

Even by the reform movement’s own standards, according to MetaMetrics’ reference material on Text Complexity Grade Bands and Lexile Bands, the newly CCSS aligned “Stretch” lexile level of 1020 falls in the 6-8 grade range. This begs the question, what is the purpose of standardizing text complexity bands if testing companies do not have to adhere to them? Also, what is the purpose of a standardized test that surpasses agreed-upon lexile levels?

So, right out of the gate, 4th graders are being asked to read and respond to texts that are two grade levels above the recommended benchmark. After they struggle through difficult texts with advanced vocabulary and nuanced sentence structures, they then have to answer multiple choice questions that are, by design, intended to distract students with answers that appear to be correct except for some technicality.

Finally, students must synthesize two or three of these advanced texts and compose an original essay. The ELA portion of the PARCC takes three days, and each day includes a new essay prompt based on multiple texts. These are the prompts from the 2016 Spring PARCC exam for 4th Graders along with my analysis of why these prompts do not reflect the true intention of the Common Core State Standards.

According to the teacher, the ELA 4th Grade Prompt # “attempts to assess the Common Core standard RL.4.5: “Explain major differences between poems, drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of poems (e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) and drama (e.g., casts of characters, settings, descriptions, dialogue, stage directions) when writing or speaking about a text.”

However, the Common Core State Standards for writing do not require students to write essays comparing the text structures of different genres. The Grade 4 CCSS for writing about reading demand that students write about characters, settings, and events in literature, or that they write about how authors support their points in informational texts. Nowhere in the standards are students asked to write comparative essays on the structures of writing. The reading standards ask students to “explain” structural elements, but not in writing. There is a huge developmental leap between explaining something and writing an analytical essay about it.

Referring to ELA 4th Grade Prompt #2, the teacher writes; “It would be a stretch to say that this question assesses CCSS W.4.9.B: “Explain how an author uses reasons and evidence to support particular points in a text.”

In fact, this prompt assesses a student’s ability to research a topic across sources and write a research-based essay that synthesizes facts from both articles. Even CCSS W.4.7, “Conduct research projects that build knowledge through investigation of different aspects of a topic,” does not demand that students compile information from different sources to create an essay. The closest the standards come to demanding this sort of work is in the reading standards; CCSS RI.4.9 says: “Integrate information from two texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about the subject knowledgeably.” Fine. One could argue that this PARCC prompt assesses CCSS RI.4.9.

However, the fact that the texts presented for students to “use” for the essay are at a middle school reading level automatically disqualifies this essay prompt from being able to assess what it attempts to assess. (It is like trying to assess children’s math computational skills by embedding them in a word problem with words that the child cannot read.)

The teacher reports that the ELA 4th Grade Prompt #3 asks students to examine an author’s “thoughts and feelings” and then write their own story about the subject of the reading passage. According to the teacher:

Nowhere, and I mean nowhere in the Common Core State Standards is there a demand for students to read a narrative and then use the details from that text to write a new story based on a prompt. That is a new pseudo-genre called “Prose Constructed Response” by the PARCC creators, and it is 100% not aligned to the CCSS. Not to mention, why are 4th Graders being asked to write about trying out for the junior high track team? This demand defies their experiences and asks them to imagine a scenario that is well beyond their scope.

Clearly, these questions are poorly designed assessments of 4th graders CCSS learning. (We are setting aside the disagreements we have with those standards in the first place, and simply assessing the PARCC on its utility for measuring what it was intended to measure.)

Rather than debate the CCSS we instead want to expose the tragic reality of the countless public schools organizing their entire instruction around trying to raise students’ PARCC scores.

Without naming any names, I can tell you that schools are disregarding research-proven methods of literacy learning. The “wisdom” coming “down the pipeline” is that children need to be exposed to more complex texts because that is what PARCC demands of them. So children are being denied independent and guided reading time with texts of high interest and potential access and instead are handed texts that are much too hard (frustration level) all year long without ever being given the chance to grow as readers in their Zone of Proximal Development (pardon my reference to those pesky educational researchers like Vygotsky.)

So not only are students who are reading “on grade level” going to be frustrated by these so-called “complex texts,” but newcomers to the U.S. and English Language Learners and any student reading below the proficiency line will never learn the foundational skills they need, will never know the enjoyment of reading and writing from intrinsic motivation, and will, sadly, be denied the opportunity to become a critical reader and writer of media. Critical literacies are foundational for active participation in a democracy.

We can look carefully at one sample to examine the health of the entire system- such as testing a drop of water to assess the ocean. So too, we can use these three PARCC prompts to glimpse how the high stakes accountability system has deformed teaching and warped learning in many public schools across the United States.

In this sample, the system is pathetically failing a generation of children who deserve better, and when they are adults, they may not have the skills needed to engage as citizens and problem-solvers. So it is up to us, those of us who remember a better way and can imagine a way out, to make the case for stopping standardized tests like PARCC from corrupting the educational opportunities of so many of our children.

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This sponge could fill a room in your home. The world’s largest, it was found in the depths of the seas near the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

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