Let's Talk Middle School Science

Mr. Aikar has been teaching Technology courses to our Upper School students this past years using a curriculum that ranges from cyber security and authentic sources, to designing games and building robots.

He will continue to teach technology as a Project to 7th and 8th graders in the Fall 2023 school year–and he will be incorporating technology directly into the curriculum as he teaches Grade 6 Science as well.

Interview with Mr. Aikar

What I intend to do next year is to make it a lot of hands-on activities. Students will be coming in and playing with things, and experiencing the joy of doing. I will have them get into the area of 3D designing and printing. I want to also introduce to them some coding so that we will gradually prepare them for our High School Robotics program. Then coding will lead to the programs Sketch (for 3d printing) and Scratch (making their own games). Then we will have 3D modeling and making their own remote control cars to play with.

We want them to enjoy learning and start their day with something like CNN10, so they can see what’s happening around the world and celebrate everything in class.

What I intend to do with Middle School Science is bring the lab into classroom. They can use a lot of props or materials of everyday use and see the science in them. They should be able to take a leaf, extract the chlorophyll out of it and see how the leaf looks without the chlorophyll. They will be able to answer their own simple curious questions. They will feel very fulfilled once they can know the answers for themselves. I don’t want to give them all the answers, I want them to be playful and joyful in the discovery of finding outthose answers.

Why students may not like Science and think it’s too hard or difficult to understand is because the approach is exactly the opposite in schools of what we should be doing. We come down with heavy theory and concepts that students feel are too abstract. What we want to do at Maharishi School is take those ideas, those concepts, take those phenomena and break them down into simple concrete theories that are associated with them. So students will learn as if they are breaking down real physical phenomena into simple math and that’s how I believe strongly that by looking at the nature around us we can use math rather than learning math and trying to fit it into nature.