Enhancing Iowa High School Students\u27 Transition to College

We present our studies of the transitions of Iowa science students from high school to post-secondary colleges. Our report summarizes information and impressions from dealing with thousands of new students arriving at our six colleges, along with meetings and discussions with high school science teachers to add their viewpoints into our considerations. Feedback from community college, four year college, and high school science teachers highlighted the following five study issues and needs for improving student transitions from high school to college science: 1) Better math preparation is needed; 2) More work with inquiry-based learning rather than with facts and memorization is needed in both secondary and post-secondary courses; 3) Students must become aware of career choices earlier; 4) Misconceptions by teachers at both levels must be minimized; and 5) High school and college science educators must improve intercommunication. To address these issues differently, our team invited Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman to be keynote speaker at the Iowa Science Teachers Fall Conference in October 2004. Dr. Lederman has campaigned for revamping the high school curriculum to have mathematics and the sciences integrated into a coherent, logical, interconnected whole, with conceptual physics first, to enable students to learn with a minimum of memorization. Feedback from high school science teachers has been very positive. Several Iowa high schools expressed interest in adopting this approach, and one Iowa high school has incorporated, at submission time, this innovation into their high school curriculum

Commercial Feeding Stuffs, from September 1, 1943, to August 31, 1944.

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The Sunfish: Laying the Groundwork for Autonomous Underwater Navigation

The task this summer was to build an interface to ease in partially-autonomous movement of the underwater robot The Sunfish. The interface acts as an intermediate layer between the drone controller acting as the basic stability and movement controls for The Sunfish and the user, allowing the user to control it via basic commands in a Python script, rather than using a controller, and laying the groundwork for autonomous navigation in the future. The Interface has several primary uses. The first subgroup of functions is basic movement functions, which are for basic movement when no underwater location system is available. The second group is advanced movement functions. These rely on a location system, and only work when on the surface, or an underwater location system has been set up. Most of the advanced commands use waypoint-based navigation, and perform actions such as returning home or loitering in a specified area. The final set of functions are data-gathering functions. These functions record data, either continuously or based on a trigger, from both the drone itself and any properly configured sensors attached to the drone. Finally, the interface is also designed to be easily expanded, so future users can easily add functionality