Intregrated STEM
Challenge Motivate Inspire
Welcome to a whole new way to teach and learn at the secondary level. Pitsco Education STEM curriculum solutions have been developed to help ensure that students are succeeding every day. Students in more than 4,000 schools nationwide are benefiting from our unique systemic methodology. Through a combination of standards-based multimedia curriculum, hands-on activities, teacher training, and unique learning environment, students have the opportunity to succeed in a classroom that’s unlike any other.
The system has proven successful in thousands of schools across the country. Both anecdotal and scientific evidence show that our hands-on, project-based curriculum titles help students succeed in the STEM disciplines in measurable ways. Increased math and science scores, reduced absenteeism, and gender equity are just a few of the powerful ways our curricula can affect a school and its students.
Career-based units begin in Grade 3, cultivate new way of thinking, learning
True success rarely happens by chance. It’s usually the result of proper planning, persistence, and passion. Heritage Academy is at the beginning stages of a new program – STEM Entrepreneurship – that adheres to this familiar recipe and promises to give our students an edge when they eventually move on to college and careers.
STEM Entrepreneurship is a course designed to expand students' knowledge of business/marketing principles related to ownership and management of a business, traits and characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, and strategies of business management and marketing.
As a first step for students in Grades 3-6, we are deepening experiences with creativity, problem solving, collaboration, and ideation that will lead them to better understand their potential future roles in business and industry in Columbus and elsewhere through our STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) Lab.
STEAM Units are exploratory activities where small groups of students work collaboratively on real-world yet age-appropriate career-type tasks in topical areas such as electricity, engineering, parachutes, and compressed air.
STEM Expeditions
In grades 7 and 8 we intregrate Pitsco's cloud-based STEM Expeditions that promote science inquiry, math practices, and engineering design principles by incorporating STEM concepts into real-world, relevant activities in our new state the art STEM Lab.
Each Expedition begins with an Essential Question, which sets the focus and shapes students' thinking. The overall goal is to create critical thinkers and problem solvers by presenting real-world challenges to engage learners with the subject matter.
Fundamental to the Expeditions learning process are collaboration and teamwork. Students collaborate in pairs and in teams as they seek to answer their Essential Question while recording data in logbooks and data sheets to authenticate their learning.
Applied Technologies
Pitsco STEM Expeditions, with zSpace (Grades 7-9) are designed from Pitsco STEM Units and Expeditions curriculum with embedded zSpace mixed reality, students use the engineering design process to engage in problem-based learning. Product design challenges require creativity, collaboration and critical thinking. Virtual reality offers the future of design and invention. Students explore careers and invent products in bio research, green future, model airplanes, wind farm, 3-D printing, robotics, and other STEM topics. Hands on. Project based. Real-world relevance.
STEM Entrepreneurship
We offer a one-of-a-kind STEM solution that meets the national need for STEM Entrepreneurship. The knowledge, products, and services used in our STEM program collectively provide the essential components of our STEM Entrepreneurship Education continuum. The STEM Units stimulate creative thought and allow for innovative ideas to be nurtured, discussed, and tested through hands-on activities where students develop essential and enduring qualities including grit, determination, and persistence within the context of an academic mashup of science, technology, engineering, and math.
Exciting, relevant, hands-on STEM curriculum
There’s no better way for students to learn a subject than to get their hands involved during the learning experience. Pitsco Education’s innovative STEM curriculum guarantees that students will interact with the topic they’re learning while being surrounded by more technology, educational instruments, software, and experiments than they might see in all their other classes combined. As a result, critical learning experiences in math, science, and language arts now take place in a classroom that is transformed into a real-world learning center – an environment where students are exposed to a variety of career fields and obtain relevant college and career readiness skills.
Exceeding tough requirements
Every teacher, principal, and administrator is accountable for meeting education standards. By design, our curriculum addresses today’s rigorous science, technology, engineering, and math standards. Every learning event in every curriculum title has been selected, evaluated, analyzed, and documented by the experienced teachers who make up our curriculum team. Our curriculum development process produces detailed analyses that reside in our proprietary standards database. This enables us to accurately correlate the events and tasks in each unit of instruction to ensure they address state and national standards.