The Roughneck Book Club held a poetry reading of Maya Angelou’s Human Family. We hope you enjoy our reading!

Recently, book club participated in a mystery skype. Librarian Lorraine Scaffidi and I met through Twitter and decided to create a mystery skype for our students.  The students had no idea where the other class was located.  We helped our students craft generic questions they could ask each other. We also encouraged our students to share a favorite book. Both classes had a blast and learned that they have much in common. They discovered that they enjoy the same type of books, and our Roughneck Book Club cheered when a student in the other class said his favorite book series was A Series of Unfortunate Events!  By the end of our time together, my White Oak students had determined that the other class lived in New Jersey. Mrs. Scaffidi’s students were pretty quick to guess that we call Texas home. Thank you for a wonderful experience!

Inspired by the TCEA 3D Design Contest, WOMS students were challenged to create their own 3D inventions.  Every year TCEA holds a 3D Design Contest for students in grades 6-12.  Only one team per school can enter the contest; therefore, the Roughneck Tech Club held a preliminary contest in which all students could enter.  The 2018 prompt was weather-related.

Texas Weather
They say, “If you don’t like the weather in Texas, just wait a minute, and it will change.” Texas is definitely a state of wildly differing weather conditions. Think about some of the problems our weather causes, be it problems with extreme heat, drought, wildfires, flash floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, etc. Design something to help meet a need or solve a problem associated with weather. You can design an original product or improve an existing one. Your design can be a scaled-down model of a solution that would be much larger in real-life.

In teams of four, the students created their inventions in Tinkercad. Each group had to use the engineering design process:  research, plan, prototype, document, test, and commercialize.  The teams also kept detailed logbooks showing their engineering design process. At the end of March, all the designs were presented in one minute presentations. All members of the tech club voted for the design they thought was most successful. The winning design will be submitted to the official TCEA 3D Design Contest.  You may view the design below.