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Welcome to the Lowell School STEM elective class website!

This is the website for Lowell School STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Math)-oriented elective classes taught by Tim Slagle, father of a (former) Lowell middle schooler. Tim has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and a life-long fascination with electronics, computers, optics, and color-changing LEDs.

You can reach him at: tim (at) lowell (dot) click or through the Lowell email system (email address TBD)

Even though my son has moved on to high school, the STEM electives will continue in the 2022-23 school year! Each term will focus on a different STEM area to allow students to sign up for topics that interest them most. First term will be fabrication, with soldering of electronic kits and other high-tech prototyping methods. Second and third terms will be robotics and artistic programming.

In the 2021-22 school year, I will be doing a series of STEM-related projects using resources from Lowell's Innovation Studio maker lab. I hope to do microcontroller gadget and game programming, 3D printing, laser cutting and electronics. Class size will be small and projects will be staggered to give everyone time on the machines.

While everyone was home because of COVID-19 I set up a server and ran a Minecraft Club so that Lowell students could play on servers with their friends. I tried to accomodate everyone and ran servers using the three different editions of Minecraft (Java, Windows 10, and Education). The Survival Plugin Server is still running and has been updated to the latest version of Minecraft (1.17.1).

In the first term of 2019, I taught a Python programming class where the code would run inside a Minecraft game. The Raspberry Jam Mod allowed us to write Python programs that do a bunch of actions in the Minecraft world. Each class meeting had instructions and resources on its own web page under Meetings.

The second term class was going to be programming games on a handheld micro game console, but it got cut short by COVID.