You know we love our year in review videos and this year’s video packs a punch! It gives us a moment to reflect on what we did, who we impacted, and how we can make more magic this year. Check it out here. You never know, you might even spot yourself or your students!
Thank you for being a part of our journey! We are excited about where we are heading this year and can’t wait to share some news with you soon.
February is a big month for future-ready learning. It is Career and Technical Education (CTE) Month, and it is also Engineers Week (Feb 22 to 28). This year’s Engineers Week theme is Transform Your Future.
We love this theme at MAD-learn because it fits naturally with how students learn through design thinking. The engineering process and design thinking both center on understanding a real need, creating a solution, testing it, and improving it. That is the kind of learning that connects directly to CTE pathways and real careers.
If you are looking for easy ways to celebrate CTE Month, ACTE has shareable resources and a toolkit you can use with your school or program.
Want a simple way to bring Transform Your Future to life? Try an app challenge: ask students to build an app that improves something they care about, like a school routine, a community need, wellness, local events, or a cause they want to support. The point is to build, learn, refine, and see how small changes can create real impact.
For Engineers Week resources and the official theme, you can reference DiscoverE here: https://discovere.org/programs/engineers-week/
Black History Month: Transform Your Future
Black History Month is also an opportunity to look at leaders who changed the future through courage, skill, and persistence. One student built an app, DreamDoctors: Dickens Way, featuring Dr. Helen Dickens and her impact on women’s healthcare. Projects like this are a powerful way to bring the Engineers Week theme, Transform Your Future, into the classroom through app development that teaches, inspires, and informs.
This month we are featuring Anne Benton, a Computer Science teacher at Creekland Middle School, in Cherokee County School District who brought MAD-learn into a powerful cross-curricular collaboration. Partnering with Social Studies teachers, her students created apps focused on water scarcity, directly connecting to a 7th grade Georgia Social Studies standard. As a first-time MAD-learn user, she shared that the project went really well and that she loved how app creation gives students a real-world reason to care about what they are learning.
She also shared that she is already thinking ahead about using MAD-learn to teach HTML with 8th grade, because while students can build websites in many ways, apps tend to spark a different kind of excitement.
This is the kind of learning we love to see; teachers teaming up across subjects so students can use technical skills to explore meaningful topics, meet standards, and create something that feels real.
… checking out all the CTE fun and partnerships that we love so much.
