Dilworth STEM Academy is Reno uses NCLab to teach 3D geometry. Here are some insights from Jennifer Jones, a Dilworth Math Teacher (posted with permission):
“The kids were working on the task of creating four 3D geometric figures and then surrounding them in a torus. The beauty is that when it didn’t work, the kids ACTUALLY preserved to figure it out! Teachers did need to help the small glitches like wrong capitalization, extra commas, or using parentheses over brackets, but the rest of it was completely student driven. This may sound horrible, but it was wonderful, when the kids shapes didn’t appear they did get angry but instead of giving up like so many at this age level do, they WANTED to keep trying until their shape was there! As a teacher, watching them persevere was amazing.”
“Next week the kids will begin the creation of their water molecule. We pulled strings and allowed them two weeks in the computer lab (two Wednesdays) to work on their molecules. We felt as though the students could complete the task in one but not fully understand all the geometry surrounded by it if they did not get adequate amount of time to fully comprehend their model. Thank you again, this is working out better than I had expected and the students are thriving on seeing the applications of math!”
