PLTW for Northwestern HPME?

QuadMaster
Tue, 17 Mar 2015 01:20:48 +0000

It seems that PLTW varies across schools. For me, I’m currently taking IOE as a senior so it’s pretty much a nostalgia run of everything I’ve learned in my pass four years, my teacher has given me some of the POE stuff to work on as it’s a tad bit more engaging/less review.

However my teacher has a habit of giving his classes large projects, and those I actually find to be both fun/engaging activities. One was this reverse engineering project where I had to pretty much document, CAD, and assembly a device that had across 30~40 complex parts. The other is designing an entire stadium, which is still in progress and we’ve been going around to different stadiums in our city to get ideas/inspiration.

All and all it’s a nice class, however it is extremely time-consuming and I would say difficult for freshman. I don’t think my freshmen self would have passed that class with anything higher than a D, the course requires a lot of self-studying(as stated above, it’s mostly the teacher reciting PLTW’s poorly made powerpoints) and commitment, staying long hours after school or late at night is not uncommon and I don’t think my moving up from middle school to high school are really ready for that level of rigor.

I would honestly recommend taking the class during your sophomore year[if you ever become set on], that way you’re more adjusted to highschool life and you’ll be able to get the opinion from other students of varying levels(something I don’t think you’d be able to do as an incoming freshmen).

I believe that if you want to improve your CTS, that you should maybe take computer science classes, where that kind of thinking is more prevalent in the classroom vs engineering classes, however engineering is ,as I’ve stated above, many times more rigorous than computer science classes(at least the ones in my school) and I believe that someone planning to become an engineer or a doctor would benefit greatly from getting that experience of overcoming that rigor.

Hope this helps.