HOLLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — Working together in teams, coming up with answers when there is no right answer and doing something that could help a real person with a real problem are pieces of Project Lead the Way at Macatawa Bay Middle School near Holland.
“The students are for the first time working on a project together. Each of them has their own tasks, and they work on different designs that deal with someone who has cerebral palsy and in that design they have different situations,” said Dennis Keegan.
Keegan is a modular technology teacher and implemented the project in his eighth-grade class. He showed the students a video from an occupational therapist, asking them to design something that might help her patients with cerebral palsy.
The idea is for them to incorporate different types of computer programs, math and science — all while learning sensitivity and compassion for someone that has the disease.
“One of the big questions a lot of us had is what is cerebral palsy? I know I didn’t really know what it was and we learned it’s a disease formed in the brain when there is an error during development”, explained eighth-grader Nick Tunks.
His project was to design an educational game that a patient between eight and 10 years old would enjoy. His therapeutic toy is a game involving three dice with numbers and math symbols that add up to different points depending on the problem the player has to solve.
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