Guerilla Educators

Rocket Park Mini Golf

With the Rocket Park Mini Golf Course, the Lee H Skolnick Architecture +Design Partnership has shown once again why their student centered, education based projects are the coolest, most engaging, and FUN places for children of all ages to be.  Constructed on the site of the 1964 New York World's Fair next to the New York Hall of Science, Rocket Park Mini Golf is replete with real Atlas and Titan rockets fully 10 stories high that help provide authentic intergalactic ambiance. 

As stated on the Hall of Science website, "Players will explore key science concepts such as propulsion, gravity, escape velocity, launch window, gravitational assist, and more as they putt their way the through nine holes:

• Launch Window – In order to reach Saturn, players must pick the right time to launch their “rocket” through turning, intersecting elliptical orbits with planets and other celestial matter that will hinder its trajectory

• Blast Off! – Visitors will be challenged to shoot their ball up an inclined ramp with just the right amount of velocity to "blast off" a model rocket up a gantry
  
• Zero Gravity – Visitors will attempt to putt their golf ball at the correct speed and path to send their ball through a loop-the-loop structure that simulates the effects of “zero” gravity
  
• Earth’s Orbit – Players will attempt to putt their golf ball at the correct speed and angle to send their “rocket” up a ramp and into geosynchronous orbit
  
• Space Docking – Spaceflight sometimes involves complex and exacting maneuvers and at this hole players must putt into one of four space shuttle-shaped targets on a rotating disk in order to reach an International Space Station model
  
• Space Junk – To avoid a collision, players must putt their ball over a rotating disk cluttered with simulated “space junk”
  
• Gravity Whip – Spacecrafts can use the gravitational pull of a planet  to change their course. This hole challenges players to use gravitational assist in the form of a curving path around the Moon to curve the trajectory of their ball in the right direction towards Jupiter
  
• Re-Entry Angle – Players must putt their ball at a proper re-entry angle through the one correct “entry area” so that their “rocket” is slowed down by the simulated atmosphere to safely land on Earth
  
• Splash Down – Visitors will aim to shoot their golf ball across the putting green and into a skee-ball type mechanism with a model of the Earth as its main target"
  

In John Tierney's June 16, 2009 article in The New York Times, "Golfing Through the Statosphere",  renowned astrophysicist Dr. Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, after playing a round with 2 fourth graders concludes, “The golf is fulfilling the museum’s mission.  Kids will learn a little. Adults will learn a little. The golf is good fun. And the rockets are cool”.  We must assume that there will be many life changing "Eureka!" moments on the part many of the youngsters who will experience Rocket Park.  Moments that could open new worlds of possibility for many of them.
Projects such as Rocket Park demonstrate how the Skolnick Partnership infuse their designs with the imponderables of childhood and captures the playfulness and whimsy that makes childhood such a special time.

CEFPI Educational Facility Planner

With the architect, David Schrader, John Sole co-wrote an article for the latest CEFPI Educational Facility Planner magazine (Volume 43/Issues 2 & 3).  Entitled "Educational Facility Design and Project Based Learning; the Real Connection", the article makes the case that school design should complement effective teaching and learning pedagogies, especially Project Based Service Learning... 

World-class teaching and learning can take place under a tree.  This seems like an odd premise to begin making the case for more effective educational facility design, however understanding the notion that a student's ability to learn is not fully contingent upon but can be shaped and informed by the building in which that learning takes place is the first step in better school design.  Click here to read the full story.

Download CEFPI 2009 Magazine

Canadian Idol's Farley Flex at Scott Collegiate

Canadian Idol's Farley Flex was at Scott Collegiate High School in Regina, Saskatchewan recently to assist Scott Principal Mr. Rod Allen, students, teachers, and Community Partners in the kick-off of a hands-on, project based educational initiative beginning in the '08-'09 school year called "Project Hip Hop".  Read all about it in the Regina Leader Post.

Click to see an original student hip hip song, "So Far So Good", created by students at Scott Collegiate 

Rap at Scott Collegiate

The grand finale of the first Scott Collegiate Dinner Theater was an original rap called "So Far, So Good." The song is about life in what Macleans Magazine called "Canada's Worst Neighbourhood." The song was written by three students at Scott in response to their home's dubious (and inaccurate) "claim to fame". Take a look...

Canadian Idol's Farley Flex was at Scott Collegiate recently to assist Scott Principal Mr. Rod Allen, students and teachers in a hands-on, project based educational initiative beginning in the '08-'09 school year called "Project Hip Hop".   Read all about it in the Regina Leader Post.  Click here to go to the Scott Hip Hip blog.

To see other student created hip hop videos, take a look at this...

Nobel Peace Prize Recipent, Wangari Maathai, Visits with Philadelphia Students.

On Monday, October 16, 2006, students from Blankenburg Elementary School were invited to a private reception with Ms Wangari Maathai , the 2004 Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Ms Maathai is best known for spearheading the planting of millions of trees through the GREENBELT MOVEMENT in her native Kenya.  The students were chosen because of the important Service Learning projects they had conducted in the creation of the "Green Cities" tile mosaic at Blankenburg, for the planting of trees around the perimeter of their school, and for a High Performance, Green architecture project.  The Community Partner for the Green Cities mosaic was NetworkArts.  This 30 foot long, student created work of art is a curriculum guide to sustainability.  The tree planting initiative was conducted with the critical Community Partnership support of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and has improved the neighborhood aesthetics around the school.  It has also made the community a healthier place to live and work and has provided the students with the opportunity to learn about native species and what it means to be good citizens.
At the reception, the students had a once in a lifetime opportunity to engage Ms Maathai in conversation about being good stewards of the Earth and about Ms. Maathai's experiences growing up in Africa.  Wangari signed copies of her book, "UNBOWED".

Inquirer Editorial | It's Not Just a Gym

The editorial, below, was written on June 17, 2006 in the Philadelphia Inquirer.   Chris Satullo, Editor of the Inquirer's Opinion section, chronicles the yearlong connections between the architectural design process and curriculum, citizenship development, students, and teachers at a high school in Philadelphia.

Editorial | It's Not Just a Gym
Kids win when we let them be part of the team

Lankenau High School in the Andorra section of Philadelphia is getting a new gym.
The $11 million addition is a very small part of the city school district's $1.7 billion construction makeover.
But it could make a big difference in the future of some Lankenau students, because educators and the project architect took the time to make them a big part of the design team.
"I wanted to involve the whole school community in the project," said architect David Schrader. So he began work last September by involving students in a five-day version of the hands-on brainstorming sessions that architects call a charrette.
The students were asked to help come up with options on where the addition should go, how it should look and how related renovations to the existing school should be handled. To give meaningful input, they had to learn about design, engineering, site planning, "green" buildings and landscaping.
The school itself is a squat thing, but it sits in a lovely wooded hollow off Spring Lane in northwest Philly. The design team wanted to come up with a way to fit the 12,000-square-foot addition snugly to the building, without losing any of the trees on the hilly site. It was a tight fit, but they did it.
During the year, Nancy Bellew's math class and Michael Hardisky's science class took the lessons way further, under the guidance of Schrader's firm and architecture students from Philadelphia University. The 20-plus Lankenau students built handsome scale models of the building and of the entire site out of foam and butter board. They did a thorough environmental survey of the land on which their school sits.
The students presented their work to their teachers, parents and members of the community last week, with enthusiasm, style and the inevitable hip-hop soundtrack.
Afterward, Jacqueline Bentley, the principal, said, "I actually have tears in my eyes. It just shows that when you give these kids a seed of something purposeful, they can take it to full bloom."
When a parent asked whether the experience had any of these students, mostly seniors and freshmen, considering a career in design or engineering, a thicket of hands shots up.
In this effort, Schrader, working with educational consultant John Sole of Guerilla Educators, demonstrated how design professionals ought to work with schools to improve the spaces where kids are asked to learn. (Schrader and Sole are doing a similar project-based learning effort with the Carver High School of Science and Engineering.)
Too often, schools are designed with only adults - and their preocuppations about cost, security and utility - in mind. They get built with little sense of how kids and their teachers actually relate to the spaces in which they are put.
As it turns out, Schrader and the school lived out a number of the core principles of school design that were sketched out last fall in the National Summit on School Design, sponsored by the American Architectural Foundation and KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

The gym isn't started yet, but the project is already a success.

Contact us here at Guerilla Educators for cutting edge Educational Facilities Design Solutions that work. We'll work with you every step of the way.