2004-2005 Events:

On March 22nd MacKinnon sixth graders took part in the Noon Day Project, sponsored by CIESE at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The purpose of the Noon Day Project is to recreate the work of the famous Greek librarian and mathematician, Eratosthenes. Over 2000 years ago this brilliant pioneer, using the simplest of tools and shadows cast by the noonday sun, successfully measured the Earth’s circumference. Today students from all over the globe are afforded the opportunity to reenact this historic event by collaboratively participating in hands-on measurement activities and on-line data collection.

The experience proved to be a smashing success! The sixth graders did a terrific job making their noon time measurements of the sun's shadow angle.

Monitoring Successful!

MacKinnon Middle School is proud to announce that MATRIX monitoring went very well.  Coordinator Chris Herdman and the MacKinnon MATRIX Team successfully realized the first year's goals and are already gearing up for summer workshop days.  All would like to express our thanks to IDE Consultant, Sally Wassell, whose guidance and encouragement helped tremendously in achieving our objectives towards technology enriched, learner active classrooms.

Webmaster and Technology teacher Debra Leary thanks all of the MATRIX Math teachers and Sally for making the development of this site such a pleasurable learning experience.

"I am really looking forward to continuing the process next year.  Please email me over the summer with your thoughts and ideas on tech enriched math lessons for the new school term."  dleary@wbps.org

MATRIX 2005  looks forward to welcoming MacKinnon eighth grade teachers, Mrs. Cunha and Mrs. Pillsbury, to the team.  Our expanded team will meet for MATRIX training workshops August 29th through September 2nd.  Tanya Bosco from IDE will be facilitating the summer workshop which will run the week of Aug 29-Sept 2.  In this, teachers will be working on creating webquests and learning the aspects of a learner active classroom.