Two Maryville schools receive TVA grants

Two Maryville schools receive TVA grants 

Daily Times 

By: Shanon Adame 

December 13, 2024   

 

Two Maryville City Schools have received STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) grants from Tennessee Valley Authority. 

Maryville Junior High and Montgomery Ridge Intermediate Schools’ STEM classrooms will each receive $3,500 to purchase materials for lessons and STEM programming. 

According to the TVA press release, out of 647 applications for funding, 342 were awarded the grant. Preference was given to applications that “explored TVA’s primary areas of focus: environment, energy, economic development, and community problem-solving.” 

Any school that received its electricity from a company served by TVA was eligible to apply. 

Maryville Junior High 

Maryville Junior High STEM Teacher Andy Hebert was one of those 342. He will use his $3,500 to purchase materials to support an ongoing project: dragster racing. 

His eighth-grade students participate in a competition to see who can design the fastest dragster. The students will design the cars and then build and race them. 

Hebert said he gives the students a few design constraints but other than that, allows them to approach how they build the cars in whatever way speaks to them. 

Some students opt to build more creative cars rather than fast cars. Hebert recalled one year, the students built a traveling Nike sneaker. 

Hebert said he likes the dynamic of the two because it speaks to students who are interested in winning as well as those who are interested in stretching their creative skills. 

The dragster program, which is decades old, has seen some changes with the development of new technologies. 

“They use a computer to design their dragster now, whereas in the old days, back when I was in school, we just carved them. We sketched them out free-hand on paper and transferred the plans on,” Hebert explained. 

The program actually used to serve seventh grade students when it was a science standard at the time, Herbert said. 

Through ongoing educational standard changes, the program sort of fizzled out, and Hebert worked to bring it back. 

Hebert said that through the dragster program, he helps support core academic standards. For instance, Hebert says his standard is “creating three-dimensional objects and models through drafting and computer-aided design.” 

He chooses dragsters to fulfill that role because it supports 8th-grade science standards on forces in motion and 8th and 9th-grade Algebra standards. 

This is the third time Hebert has won the grant. 

Montgomery Ridge Intermediate 

At Montgomery Ridge Intermediate, it was STEM Teacher Jeremy Miller’s first time receiving the grant. 

Instead of funding an ongoing program, Miller decided to launch a new one. The students will be taking to the skies with tiny drones. 

Miller is using his grant to purchase a CoDrone kit from the company Robolink. The students will learn to operate the drones through computer coding. Miller said every middle school student must take a computer science course. 

“This is a way to make it more tangible and get students more engaged,” he explained. 

The students will even have a special guest, professional drone pilot Evan Turner. 

Turner is a drone racing world champion and a former student of Miller’s. He’ll visit with the students in Miller’s class during the project to talk with them about safe drone flying practices and help with some of the coding. 

Miller plans to give the students real-world examples of what they might use drones for, like mapping an area or delivering objects to a certain place. 

The students will then create a code to make the drone perform the task. 

“Anytime you can have kids apply something that they see on a daily basis in their real life or the real world, that’s really strong because that gets them interested about careers in these different fields,” Miller said.