Ronan School District 30 includes a SmartLab™ in the Middle School and High School

From Brian Youngren

SmartLab Facilitator/Robotics Advisor

SmartLab™s are fully integrated-learning environments where everything from the technology to curriculum work together to support hands on, minds on learning. It’s a place where personalized learning and intrinsic motivation engage students of all ages, interests and abilities. Programs emphasize STEM, media arts or a blend of both. Students are creating remarkable projects that motivate them to inquire, explain, tackle new problems and celebrate their solutions. Learners apply a wide range of technologies to projects that matter to them personally and academically.

Students explore. They problem solve.

They collaborate and create. And they learn. Both schools offer competitive STEM programs as well.

Currently in the Middle School students can be a part of SD30 RMS Robotics. Students are presented with a real world engineering challenge. The challenge this is year is Trash Trek.

Twenty eight students on three teams are designing a robot to complete tasks on the competition table as well as exploring the world of trash. The teams will be researching and coming up with a new way or enhancing a current way of dealing with trash and then presenting it to a panel of Judges at the state meet held annually on the MSU campus in February. More information can be found at www.usfirst.org.

Ronan High School is a member of the Technology Student Association, a national organization of students engaged in science, technology, engineering and mathematics

(STEM). TSA competitions are both team and individual events. Some of the events are VEX Robotics, solar sprint cars, application design, 3D CAD, career prep, digital photography, and structural engineering to name a few. The state conference is held in Billings this April and is a qualifying step for the national conference being held in Nashville.