Great things are happening every day in La Crosse public schools. Hear first-
hand from teachers on the front lines about how the La Crosse Public Education Foundation is strengthening the community, one student at a time.

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Transcription is for seo purposes and is not 100% accurate.
Steve Johnston teaches engineering and digital electronics at Logan High School.

Welcome to Goldstar educators podcast from the La Crosse public education foundation. Great things are happening every day lacrosse public schools hear first-hand from teachers that are on the front lines about how this nonprofit education foundation is strengthening our community, one student at a time to get a lifeline here will just without their support and at that week you could do some of the things that none of the project would've been available Steve Johnson as an engineering and digital electronics teacher at Logan high school. I think our kids are super blessed to have things like engineering and digital electronics and things like that now available to them in high school. What kind of grants has a lacrosse public education foundation but able to help you with a great deal with a number project done. One of the first one grant I wrote was for a remote operated underwater vehicle basically made out of PVC pipe and bilge pump microcontrollers that had a WebCam and we would go down to the bottom like all put cool or a lake so I don't want the first one to get them. We moved to another project called their unmanned aerial vehicle and we partnered with their inland power to design the vehicle and what happened to your own power to send a helicopter out quarterly to take a look at powerline education going over and so on. We thought well let's try to make a grown would do that you expect of powerline and go through that difficult terrain that we moved to another when we partnered with the train Ingersoll-Rand through design and build a vehicle for you. You've probably heard about the Google car right and use vehicles that are driver left and they have a semi that goes between two plants quite a and they're wondering if there's any way they could automate that we decided to take a look at a vehicle that was capable of thinking that the environment and navigating without human input. We decided had be powered by solar energy, so is really neat design activity for the kids and we ended up designing a vehicle that is about the size of go-cart is what what would be so is this about the scale of force solely on what things you tell me the high school students designed every one of these things you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. We were very fortunate to be in a community where we have unity support in the form of local engineers and businesses and industries that will come in and be partner with and give the kid that that's the question over the top that they need. As far as finding out how to do a lot of these projects have been posted online for the defendant from start. How we document the engineering design process and picture the kids doing different things as well as all our successes and failures like the Kelly kids fail forward and if you're going to fail fail early, though failure is just something that we have to accept and in a job and learn from. So when we make a mistake for something doesn't work we learn from it and then use that to fail forward move forward in the process. We just don't want to fail late in the process used project that we've done no II think it's the key point is districts can't just don't have the budgets to support a lot of these things so I was out. Organizations like the La Crosse public education foundation, I and other community partners. I mean none of these things would've happened. These kids wouldn't have got those experiences and it's a really sad thing because I think that if they don't happen because no movement. Some of these stem related careers. As you can be really nice paying job was things are happening in the cross public schools is a workable cost public education foundation. The foundation depends on five fundraising to provide grants to teachers and money for random acts of kindness to address students leave that create obstacles to attendance, self-esteem and academic success. To learn more and to donate please visit La Crosse education foundation.org that's La Crosse education foundation.award the Goldstar educators podcast is a podcast for hire.com production