My name is Tom Bieschke and I am an enthusiastic and engaging educator with a passion for designing educational scenarios that offer participants an an interactive experience that offers foundational guides, but is driven by learner choice. As participants move through the learning set an iterative cycle helps direct and shape personal inquiry. While each learner chooses, the scenario intensifies by providing purposeful and powerful obstacles that encourage participants to utilize available resources to build solutions. Students learn by doing, but, more importantly, remember what they learned by using the scenario to help reshape the learned behaviors and apply those skills to the current frustration.

iPlanToLearnNOW is currently implementing a program at Einstein Academy in Elgin called, iPTLNOW: What is Technology? The curriculum provides 36 thirty minute lessons to Pre-12 with the intention of teaching 100 students (all levels) to code a solution to a unique scenario. The curriculum guides students to the intended assessment by providing an entrepreneurial challenge. The students are provided a limited set of materials and asked to Identify a salable product that could be produced. The students are then asked to provide a process for making the product. Individual or groups of students then provide a "Pitch" to the entire school for why their product has the best opportunity for success. Students vote on the best idea.
The chosen idea then forms the basis for a series of tables, graphs, names, addresses, costs, times, places that need to be organized through a database. Students are challenged to use the available resources to produce a "Query" rich environment and maximizes Google's powerful Sheets to form the basis of SQL. Students are provided redundant opportunities to improve the functionality of system produced by adding scripts, functions, conditional formatting. All graphs, charts, reports are produced using Google's Data Visualization app. The final scenario on the 35th session is for a students to be confronted with scenarios that branch access more challenges and scaffolded support.

The greatest challenge faced by students today is relevance. In order for students to want to participate, they MUST believe in the purpose. All people do what they WANT; Pre-12 are no different. At the heart, iPlanToLearnNOW provides opportunities for "want to" learning!