Paper helicopters lay scattered on the ground as NCSSM Online students in the Honors Topics in Civic Mathematics course prepare to drop more from a staircase. (photo: Ashley Loftis)
NCSSM Online students only get one chance a semester to study on the school’s physical campus, but when they do, they embrace it. Nearly 170 of them took advantage of the last NCSSM Online Weekend of the academic year to study with their Online peers in the labs and classrooms of NCSSM-Durham and NCSSM-Morganton. Fourteen classes (nine in Durham and five in Morganton) covering a wide range of disciplines were held across both campuses.
Garrett Love, NCSSM’s Dean of Engineering and Computer Science, works with other deans to organize and manage NCSSM Online Weekends. The program as a whole is a core part of what NCSSM is about, he says.
“Our mission as a public high school isn’t just to work within the physical confines of the school,” he says. “A big part of the mission is to reach out to students across the entire state and meet them where they are. And that’s what the Online program does. It lets students design their future right there in their home communities.”
Ashley Loftis ’07, a Durham-based math instructor, led 12 NCSSM Online students from her Honors Topics in Civic Mathematics in an Online Weekend workshop. Though generally focused on using statistics to explore topics such as voting theory and apportionment of representatives, Loftis had students apply some of those same mathematical principles to a “helicopter drop,” where students dropped various paper helicopters from the external stairways that rise three stories along the side of NCSSM-Durham’s Watts Hall. Students then evaluated the data to make determinations about the vehicles’ descent rates.
“I really wanted the students to do something fun that also used math,” she says. “Because they are Online students, they never really get to interact with their classmates very much. I wanted to do something that would have them engaging with each other while learning and enjoying themselves. I think we forget the fun part sometimes.”
Neil Goyal, a junior at Cox Mill High School in Concord, has long been interested in how math plays a role in nearly every aspect of life. The Civic Mathematics course provided him with the opportunity to explore that interest without having to leave his home community. “I was committed to remaining at my home school,” he says, “but some of the courses that NCSSM Online has are just so unique that you cannot find them anywhere else,” he says. “The program definitely offers the best of both worlds.”
Jon Davis ’88, an instructor of engineering, taught 24 students in an Honors Agricultural Biotechnology course on the NCSSM-Morganton campus that explores how science and engineering are working together to create more hardy crops and efficient farming practices. Students focused their Saturday on the engineering aspect, getting plenty of hands-on time working with single-board microcontrollers called Arduinos.
“Basically, the students were prototyping their own smart devices that might, say, regulate the temperature in a chicken egg incubator, or sense the moisture level of soil around a plant and water it when necessary,” Davis says.
This is the third NCSSM Online course that Eliana Mah, a Hillsborough resident who is a junior at Voyager Academy High School, has taken. With plans to become an engineer, the Online program has been invaluable to her. The courses she has taken through it have provided the only opportunities to date to build working devices.
“It’s been super interesting getting to tie in electrical engineering with agriculture,” she says. “That’s not something that I originally would have thought that I would have been super interested in, but as I’ve gotten to work with the teacher and some of the projects, I’ve really become much more interested in it.”
Across the board, Davis says he sees a tremendous amount of intellectual and social energy among the students while they are with him. “They show up with great enthusiasm because they only have one day on campus, and they try to make the most of that day,” he says. “It’s a really big deal. They wait all semester for this.”
Neil certainly looked forward to it. “What’s super cool about Online weekends is that meeting the students in my class gave me a whole new perspective on them, and allowed me to learn so much more about other people’s experiences,” he says. “That connection that happens in person cannot be replicated any other way.”
