An innovative program at Chestermere High School challenged 20 grade ten students to "make the world a better place."

The Engineering Futures Program was the brainchild of the school's principal and mathematics teacher Scott Seland who has been the driving force behind it, according to Sarah Douglas who is another teacher in the program.  Douglas calls the program incredibly worthwhile.  

"These students get to tackle real world problems and real world situations while at the same time learning all the stuff that you'd learn in a normal standard classroom.  It just sort of answers the question 'why does this matter.'"

Douglas says the students learn all of their core subjects and all of their options through cross curricular, collaborative, inquiry based projects.  "Their design, sort of their big theme this year was, 'how to make the world a better place.'"

Making the world a better place is a noble theme, but how do a group of grade ten students do that?  Douglas says it's happening.

"One of the big projects that we took on this year was an accessibility project where we looked at the students with the highest needs in our high school and how we could better meet those needs.  We also had a group of students work on a mentorship program for how to better integrate these students into the social and cultural aspects of our high school."

The programs weren't just talked about but are actually being implemented at Chestermere.  Douglas says, "The mentorship program is currently being implemented starting this week and we've spoken to the people at the school district about how we can implement better ways of actually moving around our school and decrease the traffic in some of the tighter spaces."

Douglas thinks the future for the program is bright.  "We've already started receiving applications for next year even though the deadline isn't until the end of May. "  The fact that the students say they love the program won't hurt either.

 

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