Ms. Ashley Ivers Receives Grant

Ashley Ivers, 5th grade teacher, participated in a six week summer research program this past summer offered by the University of Houston’s Engineering department. The RET program, Research Experience for Teachers, is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and provided twelve Houston area teachers grants to work alongside of Graduate and PhD students to contribute to engineering research labs at U of H. RET is designed to provide teachers with the opportunity to conduct a research project under the guidance of a faculty advisor, and develop teaching modules related to engineering to take back to their classrooms.programming. The module that Miss Ivers brought back from this program incorporates team building, problem solving, reasoning and some basic engineering principles. Her 5th grade students will use a technological design process to organize information and solve a problem. The objective for students is to design and construct the tallest tower within their groups under a time limit, a budget to spend, and by only using specific materials. The key for fifth grade students to be successful is to work together to come up with a strong base and a sturdy structure. Ms. Ivers will continue to implement what has been learned through this beneficial summer program into her classroom and share what she has learned with fellow teachers at St. Anthony of Padua.

During this program, the teachers define a research problem, use modern methods associated with a literature search, design experiments, learn about data analysis, and prepare and give reports and presentations.

The projects covered a variety of topics, such as the diverse fields of control systems, structural ngineering, chemistry, biomedical engineering, optics, and computer

We are very proud of Ms. Ivers for being selected for the program.